Gray Snow Development Blog - Episode 1 - Starting Off by Saying Goodbye

I decided to make this blog as a way to chronicle the development of a game I'm currently making, called Gray Snow. It's an adventure horror game that's based around subtlety and mental tricks, where your very surroundings shimmer with an ever growing sense of deeply buried malignancy towards you. The reason I'm making this blog is partly so I have a place to stuff my rambling about my game so I'm not being annoying, but also to provide a source of learning to those who are interested; learning by watching me learn, in a way. And unlike that one blog that I made like two years ago that I ended up abandoning, I've been working on this project for nearly a year now and have no sign of stopping, so expect regular updates.

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Episode 1 - Starting Off by Saying Goodbye

Why am I saying goodbye? Well, I'm saying goodbye more specifically to the Unity build of the game that I've been working on for the past 8 months. I've done some thinking and I've decided that I'm building the game in Unreal Engine 4 as opposed to Unity 5. Why is that?

• Unreal Engine is simply better. Seriously, after giving it a spin, it's kind of insane how much stuff there is in it that Unity is totally lacking. A more coherent UI, massively better workflow, etc. I mean for Christ's sake, Unity doesn't even have a grid to place stuff on. Like, you have to actually place each little prop in the pixel right spot and just hope that it's aligned properly. That might be acceptable for an outdoor scene, but for an interior-based game like Gray Snow, it's a living nightmare, making sure every wall is lined up. Also, Unreal Engine's got a system called Blueprint, where instead of having to code logic line by line, it's all placed in little modules that you can link together. It's much more visually oriented and coherent than having to learn C# and program everything off of scripts you find off of the internet because I don't want to learn an entire language just so my character makes fucking footstep sounds goddamnit. The major downside to Blueprint is that it executes several times slower than actual straight code, but Gray Snow's an adventure game and, thus, fairly low on logic, so it shouldn't be a big deal.

• Unreal Engine looks better. Unity 5 got a pretty huge graphical update as it included global illumination, which is some fancy bullshit that makes lights bounce off of surfaces more realistically or something I don't know. That combined with the fact that image effects like film grain and depth of field are now free to use makes it so that you can make a pretty competent looking game, visually at least. However, it has no match with Unreal. Global illumination is old news to Unreal, and it's absurdly easy to make a near-photorealistic looking scene in it. Since graphical fidelity is important to Gray Snow (gotta get that immersion), it's all good.

Goddamn look at that mmm toasty graphics

• I've kind of dug myself into a hole. At the beginning, I was less making a game and more screwing about. Which means, I placed walls and stuff where they shouldn't be, did a very sloppy job, and made a lot of mistakes that have now come and bit me in the ass. Problem is, it's hard to build off of that. It's like laying down a crappy foundation, and then building a skyscraper on that foundation and woah you've got a crappy skyscraper. Sure, you could dig back down and rearrange the foundation, but it's a huge ordeal and you risk totaling the work you've spent a lot of time on, which means you've wasted your time. I feel like it's better that I start anew and create a fresh foundation with the knowledge and dedication that I've rounded up during my work on the Unity build of Gray Snow. That way, I can work on it knowing safely that my level won't fucking blow up in an overflow of errors and miscalculated UV meshes.

It's definitely going to be a pain in the ass migrating everything to a whole new engine, but it's for the better, both in the short term workflow of the project and the long term vision for the game. Also I hope this didn't sound like an advertisement for Unreal or anything. I'm just pretty excited of how much more streamlined it is over Unity. It's quite the relief.

Anyway, in the future, I'll probably talk a little more about the artistic and aesthetic aspect of Gray Snow and go more into detail at the (hopefully) unique type of horror and atmosphere I'm trying to achieve. I hope this was at least mildly interesting to someone.