#20: The Break That Wasn’t
“Sometimes you’re so busy you just have to make up your own quote of the week.”
Project update
I can’t believe I’m up to a 20th blog post, but it’s been 3 weeks since I’ve written one, making this the longest time between blog posts since I started. The reason for that is because a great deal has happened, all for the power of good!
I announced the name of my game: I Am This Castle! Check out the fantastic creative team here!
ACT art grant applications opened on the 1st of June and I’ve been preparing the support material for my application since January - I was so ready that I completed the first draft of my application on June 1st and 2nd. It will be refined multiple times before July 31st when the grant application round closes, but we’re off to the races now.
I spent an intensive 3 weeks making an announcement trailer which you can see here! Go check it out!! You know what, nope, I’m gonna make you watch it by pasting a link to it right here.
I attended Unreal Fest 2024 on the Gold Coast, where I connected with many other industry participants using Unreal Engine. I attended 10 talks and training sessions on:
Building bespoke tools to solve bespoke problems.
Unreal’s VFX system, Niagara, for simulating particles, fluids and volumes.
Procedural content generation for believable landscapes.
User interface best practice principles and tools for Unreal Motion Graphics (the built-in user interface system in Unreal Engine).
Advanced rendering and debugging tips, tricks and lessons.
An implementation of State Tree (a plugin for UE5 with different capabilities than Behaviour Tree) as applied to artificial intelligence for NPCs.
Destructible objects using the Unreal Engine ‘Chaos’ system!! This was so fascinating and fun, seeing the different ways for efficiently and dynamically breaking 3D meshes into pieces in believable ways, in real time, according to properties like the materials the object is made of.
Tips and tricks for shipping games faster. This was a highly complex talk about C++ improvements that can be implemented inside and outside of Unreal Engine to make software development smoother and more consistent. It was great, a lot of it went over my head, but I’ll dig into it more over time.
Advanced Blueprint for UE (Blueprint being the proprietary system that UE has which is a designer and artist-friendly way to code using objects that you drag and drop, rather than coding lines of text). This was brilliant, and made me feel very satisfied that I’m already implementing most of what the Epic Games team, the makers of Unreal Engine, consider to be advanced techniques.
Lighting systems. This was absolutely eye-opening into the ways that Nanite and Lumen, the two principal lighting technologies in Unreal Engine, work together to produce spectacular effects in real time. There was a strong emphasis on the limitations of the system, not from the perspective that they are inherently limiting, but as a means of educating users on the best ways in which to use Nanite and Lumen.
Multithreading!! A lot of the specifics here went over my head because it was highly technical, but I believe that I absorbed the underlying principles adequately. For my friends and loved ones who aren’t programmers, multithreading is (in my mind), a way to tell your computer to stop using its brain in an “inch wide and a mile deep” fashion to an “inch deep and a mile wide” fashion. For maths reasons, this is orders of magnitude faster.
This was at 9am. I deserve your sympathy.
I could talk about this for a long time, so I’ll leave it here at a summary level. The convention was amazing, and the party at the end really took a lot of my stress about networking away. I will 100% be back next year!
Personal reflections - Networking
Before writing about networking, I want to say that it made me feel so warm, welcome and accepted that after an excellent welcome to Yugambeh country (I apologise that I can’t locate the local speaker’s name in the schedule!) Unreal Fest was kicked off by an extension of welcome and a reminder that all people are welcome there. As a trans person, I am not the only party being addressed by this, but it truly made all the difference to how comfortable I felt going into the event.
Having said that, I brought quite a lot of stress with me going into Unreal Fest’s networking morning teas, lunches and afternoon teas. This is not because I am stressed about life, but because, as a trans person, every time I introduce myself to someone new, there remains a question mark in my mind about how I will be perceived, and more than that, treated as a person. This is very challenging, because it caused me, many times, to withhold that my game is about trans experiences because I didn’t want to be exposed to a strong adverse reaction. My worry about the way people might react to me caused me to repeatedly leave it at “this is an adventure game”, even though there is an audience who would be much more interested in the game and its authentic storytelling if I used the more specific description that it is a game about trans experiences. However, hypervigilance to the very real possibility that I would be received poorly elevated my stress above my fellow attendees.
This feeling persisted right up until the party at the end of the convention, where a couple hundred of us descended on a venue nearby that had been organised by Epic Games. At this point, the sense of community and shared mutual interests caused all of my anxieties to vanish, and I felt the familiar sense of being ‘at home’ that PAX Aus gives me every year. It was With all of that said, I met about a dozen wonderful and lovely people, the majority of which actually work in film, special effects or television, as opposed to games. I gained a new perspective about how widely used Unreal Engine is across different industries like tv, film, automotive and fashion, which has me feeling confident that building my skills in the software is a real value-add to me.
Until next week, dear friend.
