Final Year. Final Game Project. Let's Do This!

Hi, I'm Roland. I'm starting my third year of Games Programming BSc in September, and I have to begin making my final game project (my dissertation piece) during the summer.

This blog will document my journey creating it. Wish me luck!

So then, what to make?

While I honestly adore the design process of making games just as much as building them, I can sometimes struggle to generate the seed of a fresh concept - I'm much better at fleshing out ideas once I have something to work from. That being said, having previous experience in software development, I know all software should look to solve or address a set of goals or aims. So I decided to start with what aims I want my game to accomplish.

1. It should showcase good development skills. As this is likely the first game I'll show potential employers in future, it needs to show my ability to develop challenging features, not just fun or pretty ones.
   

2. It needs a 'wow' factor. Something cool and interesting. Not just to impress employers, but for my own interest as well! There's nothing wrong with doing what's already been done, but pushing boundaries is always going to be a more fun project, for me, at least.
   

3. A bit of narrative design maybe? I'm a programmer first, but I love making stories, and the emotions that come from them - if I can fit a good storyline into every game I can, I will (even if it's just in my head). Learning more about game and narrative design is a side mission of mine.
   

4. Scope is important, if not crucial. I tend to be ambitious with the games I make, but as I will be making the majority of this game by myself, I need to keep the scope appropriate if I want to get it to the degree of polish that I desire.
   

5. Fun please! Is it even really a game if it's not?

I thought about these for a while, and to help with design I decided to hone in on aims 1 & 2. Eventually, I decided to create my first two requirements for the project.

1. It should make use of the latest/recent technology. Thinking logically, any developer will need to learn the newest technology as it comes out. Not only will it likely help the development workflow in future, but if I make efforts to use new tech, it'll hopefully help me stand out in future job-hunting situations.
   

2. It will be created in Unreal Engine 5. It could be said that this an extensive of requirement 1 as of the time of writing, UE5 is still quite new (Currently the latest version being 5.2.1), however I've always intended on developing games in Unreal Engine from the start of my games dev journey, as I like the workflow and the style of games it can create. I like Unity also, but if I can work with Unreal Engine, I will.

After deciding on these two requirements, I managed to come up with an idea for what my game could be based around.

I try to keep up with interesting industry news & feature updates, particularly with Unreal Engine, and I was aware of one of the biggest releases that Epic Games shipped in 5.2, being their Procedural Content Generation Framework (PCG). You can watch Epic Games' PCG Presentation on YouTube here -> https://youtu.be/aoCGLW53fZg

With this brand new, ground-breaking technology, it is super easy to procedurally generate beautiful environments, however, I would like to explore whether I can use this feature for gameplay.

So do we have a game idea then?

After lots of research into Unreal's PCG and additional research on existing procedurally generated games such as Minecraft & No Man's Sky and how they work, I managed to come up with a core gameplay mechanic I'd like to base my gameplay around...

...but I'll talk about that more on the next post.

Next Post