Thought process within jam time

The day I know about this jam is a week before the jam started, and it's also the day that I started the Unreal Engine C++ course. I spent a crazy week trying to absorb as much knowledge as I could, tho I know it won't help me much because I would do the jam with blueprints anyway. At least I got myself familiar with the editor in Unreal Engine.

I always told people that I'm learning on the fly and it's true by that, that's why I only planned for a simple play loop game that I could easily finish within a few days. Initially I planned that it won't be that hard so I will finish everything within 3 days, I overestimate myself or underestimate Unreal Engine too much or both.

The first 3 days I spent on following 4 tutorials about player controller just to see how people work differently(I excluded those that have similar workflow) then on the 4th day I just took a break to absorb everything I learned so far and also take some space to recover from the dizziness on that day.

On the 5th, 6th, 7th day I spent on trying to develop my game but with slower pace, well it was super slow and I thought did I procrastinate too much or avoiding the difficulty? I still trying to keep in touch with all the people in jam's discord so that I keep my sanity there. Thanks folks for being there I'm saved by that.

On the day 8th, 9th, and 10th I spent on trying to make the AI work as good as possible. I used behavior tree for AI and Animation montage with notify state in order to finish the basic zombie AI. At first I was so discouraged because of the difficulty rise and I feared that I might not be able to complete in time. The AI here is like everything in my game, without them there is basically nothing even though the game is still walk sim right now but at least it's better with them there.

On the day 11th, I spent the whole day setting up the level. I design a simple level just like that with the idea of modular system and used some textures from quixel which I regretted later on. After the level completed and I finished developed the play loop that I planned I slept and then woke up to finish the end credit page.

On the day 12th, I spent the day on fixing stuffs like player camera, reloading issue, and animation snapping(some glitches because I didn't set it up carefully so I changed the system a little). Then I composed the music for end credit.

The most obvious problem I found is not that I learned stuffs on the fly or time restriction because it's fair enough for people to reflect on their skills in game development by using the jam. Rather the size of this project is too big, it's my fault for not manage the assets well enough and I also forgot to excluded those I'm not using from the project. The build is also too big, it's nearly 3GB and that's pretty much scared me away from using Unreal Engine in the future.

I'll research for this particular problem so that I could have good enough scope for my desired game or rather my first commercial game in the near future. By that I mean the quality of assets and project management must keep in mind and I must learn how to do that quickly otherwise I would get the same problem later on my journey.

My focus is to make games with good performance so even my potato laptop from 2008 can still play it, and I think this gonna be problematic if I'm using Unreal Engine because it's not famous for being good in this aspect.

Reasons I decided to use Unreal Engine are the tools they provided and marketplace because there are plenty of quality assets and tools out there and some even give us for free. I also came to like Anim montage because of how easy to manage animations and Behavior tree because of its simple but powerful functions to keep AI organized. Also the Unreal Engine 5 is on the way that's a little more hype that I'm looking forward tho the real thing is disappointing because the direction is completely different that the way I wanna go.

There are things I need to decide from now on too, Do I want to keep using UE4? I'll research on stuffs then gonna decide later but at least I tried and pretty much like the workflow in general. What do I want to do next? I might want to focus on 3D modelling for the sake of future for a while before actually work on my own game, or just go back to 2D and try to improve on what I know. But anyway the most important thing is that I learned something and that's gonna help me on my journey. I wanted to decided on the tools I wanna use during the development for my first commercial game before decide on anything else. That's why if you know how to make a performance focus game on Unreal Engine please tell me, I want to understand the workflow before deciding.