I am probably the last person on the Internet to realize, but did you know you can just download Unreal Engine 5 and make your own games?

For FREE? (up to a point).

Look! Look! It’s right there.

I signed up for an Epic Games account mostly just to see what the platform was about and what games they had to offer. Bam. Here’s Unreal Engine. Not finding something you like, then how about you show us how to do it right.

OK, no. It’s just there prominently displayed for ease of install. It’s too bad I just threw in the towel on content creation after years of doing it for no apparent reason. Because creating custom meshes and doing all the game development on top of that sounds like so much work a person could totally lose themselves in…

I’ve now downloaded and installed Unreal Engine 5.5.

Blender updated? Check.

Tutorial videos by the excellent Unreal Sensei? Queued.

I wrote one game for a programming class in college. It was an entry level class I really should have challenged, but at any rate I didn’t. The professor provided most of the assets and even some of the logic for the game, and then we wrote the rest. It was stupid.

The point is, I have no game development experience. I do have tons of programming experience, though. Including a lot of object oriented programming and design theory that UE’s nodes concept builds upon.

It’s not like I think I’m going to produce the next Mass Effect soloing the view port in my living room. I do have a few ideas for some games that might be fun to tinker around with just to see how far I can get. I’ll keep my Blender skills sharp, at least. Perhaps even gain new appreciation for the game development process. I try not to give devs a hard time, but after years in QA the neuropathways are pretty much set.

Look forward to many posts – not just about playing games – but about what it takes to make them. Even small, weird ones. Because it will be small and weird if it becomes anything at all. And I will be able to explain all of this process to you with the benefit of absolutely zero wisdom.

This… might be the best day of my life.

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(on a side note: I’ve finished moving my domain. chrisdangerferret.wordpress.com and dangerferret.games should both now redirect to dangerferret.com.)