In May, I posted about the release of Unreal Engine 4 distracting me from working on Star Citizen ships. I subscribed, did some fiddling and learning, and basically fell in love with the engine.
Shortly thereafter, it became impossible to work on anything that stressed my system more than a little because the motherboard problems that I mentioned in that post degraded stability to the point that the machine would blue screen if you looked at it funny. I couldn’t scrape together the funds to replace the motherboard until late in the year.
On top of that, I lost a brother to cancer in the latter half of the year. I won’t go into details here, except to say that it took slightly more than five months … from shortly after Independence Day when he had the seizure that robbed him of some mobility, memory, and fluency; to shortly before Thanksgiving when he finally succumbed to complications.
For these reasons and others, it has taken some time to recover my motivation. But in late January, with a newly stable computer, I started getting interested in UE4 again, especially the prospects of doing VR development. I had already decided to resubscribe as soon as I had the money, but I was kindly gifted with a month’s subscription after randomly poking my head into a dev stream by one of the moderators of Epic’s forums. That enabled me to update to the current 4.6 version.
After spending the first week re-familiarizing myself with the engine, I decided that I needed to focus on one project, rather than chasing every single idea that occurred to me. The project that I’ve settled on is based, with permission, on the tabletop RPG M-Force: Monster Hunting in the 21st Century, created by my friends at Hex. I am calling it “Cryptid”.
The tabletop game is set in a world where monsters are real, and everyone knows it (rather like serial killers, few expect to ever actually encounter one), and there are organizations that hunt them, such as the titular M-Force. In the game’s lore, M-Force’s national headquarters occupies the (fictional) early 20th century Witterstadt Mansion and estate, and their academy is situated on an adjoining property.
I am constructing these locations in UE4, with the aim of creating a digital/VR tour similar (as you may recall from the post in May, this is exactly the sort of thing I love to do with game engines). Potentially this work could evolve into a proper video game down the road, but for now I will have my hands full just making the plethora of assets needed for two mansions and a half dozen assorted other buildings, so game mechanics are primarily done as a learning exercise.
I will be posting here from time to time on the progress of the project.
dyne3d 