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Once the choice was made to use Unreal Engine as the development platform for Veiled Reality, Tarique set about familiarising himelf with the engine itself prior to starting on coding.
Unreal was selected ahead of Unity as we needed to take advantage of Metahuman and Lumen to see how far we could push fidelity. We needed an engine that would provide us with the necessary tooling to create the look and feel that we desired.
Though having worked with many 3D engines over the years this was Tarique’s first foray into Unreal and – it being somewhat of a behemoth – he decided to become fully familiar with the ecosystem and get back into C++, after a twenty year hiatus. He felt It was like coming back home to real development again!
A SOLO UNREAL BOOTCAMP
A SOLO UNREAL BOOTCAMP
Familiarised with Unreal Engine editor.
Work in C++ and see how Blueprints works hand in hand.
Set up a development environment and workflow:
Jetbrains Rider for coding
Unreal Engine 5.2 -> 5.3
Blender
Reallusion Character Creator/ iClone apps for importing characters into Metahuman.
Develop several mini projects to familiarise with the Engine:
Game modes.
Enhanced Input System.
Pawn/Character classes.
Character animation.
Working with animation rigs/IK setups.
Physics simulation.
AI using Behaviour Trees.
Navigation.
Spacialised audio.
Cloth and particle systems.
Metahuman:
Work with Metahuman creator to create placeholder characters.
IK rig retargeting to create a playable character.
Create a third person / first person character controller from scratch with full IK support.
Investigate facial animation rigging and animation.
Work with Animation Blueprints / Blend Spaces / Sequencer to get to grips with how we will animate the main protagonist during dialogue sequences.
Lots of coding in C++ to create the backbone for the game itself!:
Character controller
Character classes for Player and AI characters.
Game mode handling.
Interactable triggers and event/messaging system.
Animation sequence triggers for the player.
Audio.
Finalise the look and feel of the game and identify asset packs from the Unreal Store that we can utilise for the build.
Develop a workflow for scanning actors and recreating them as Metahumans.
Finish blocking out the environment (exterior and interior).
Build the environment.
Investigate apps like Cascadeur to see if this can help with our animation workflow, utilising AI assisted animation sequences based on real motion capture.
More coding!!!:
Develop the prologue sequence between player and “in-ear” companion guiding her.
Dialogue system.
Cloth system for animating the artefacts.
Finalise audio playback / ambient music/audio.
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