So now I had completed my little test and even faster than I had expected. I was full of euphoria, of course, the whole thing was graphically a patchwork from the Epic Marketplace. But I was primarily interested in the functions that I needed for a prototype. I didn't want to tackle assets until I had something halfway solid.

So now I had my little list and thought about how I should proceed. I took the "features" and researched which plug-ins or packages were already available and looked at them in detail.

In addition, I put some YouTube tutorials on the topics on my "must view" list and....

Have started the project all over again.

I thought about some structures, for example for items / inventory, and implemented the whole thing, including the first rudimentary UIs.

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When I had finished these functions after about 3 weeks, I asked myself an important question: Do I want to have a multiplayer mode in the game?

I really took my time with this question, discussed it with Annabell and we came to the conclusion. If the game ends up being fun, it would be great to play it with friends or a partner, wouldn't it?

So I did some more research and talked to other people who had experience. That's how I came to the Unreal Source Discord channel.

I am incredibly grateful for the patience the people there have shown me. It's a great community!

In the end, I had lots of question marks, tons of new links to learn and basically had to rethink everything and start from scratch.

Another 3 weeks later, however, I had a working multiplayer mode for the prototypes. It doesn't feel perfect, but I was able to maintain new items relatively easily, create plants with different attributes and then use them in the game. There were a few things that didn't feel quite right to me so far (in terms of maintaining the blueprints) and could also be problematic for the scaling of the project, so I took another look at the Unreal Source Discord.

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This evening was meaningful for me because I met Michael Pattison there. He has his own YouTube channel and Discord and how can I put it … his videos made it "click" in so many places in my head.

After a few conversations, discussions and input on his Discord channel, I decided to throw pretty much everything overboard again.

The result, the "code" / blueprints became much clearer, the systems much more modular, at the same time some new functions were created such as the boxes, which are already placeable.

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It was starting to feel really cool and smooth. Time to deal with assets and the graphic part a bit more, but I'll do that in the next post and there's a little story about how I was scammed by a "senior 3D artist" -.-

Progress:

We use "Ultra Dynamic Sky"
Originally, the item system was based on datatables and structs, but we have replaced these with UObject-based systems. This makes accessing objects much easier and is super flexible, I love working with UObjects
In general, we have converted many systems to UObjects and are much more flexible as a result, the blueprints have been significantly expanded
We have learned a lot about hierarchies and casts, which has enabled us to optimize a lot of things that would otherwise have definitely become a problem later in the development process
We purchased a library of sounds to get some feedback
We created a few effects for the Niagara system, as we all know you eat with your eyes

Best regards
Kevin

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By the way, here you can find a list of links about Unreal Engine, Blender which helped me a lot:

https://snailpacegames.com/links