Ultimate Guide on How To Build a Full Game in Unreal : VOLUME 1

How to Make a Video Game: 5 Steps

Choose between Unreal Engine or Unity
Buy Asset Packs to build a foundation for your game
Think of a story and characters and how they’ll mix with the mechanics
Create a project and fill it with assets
Build, iterate, test, backup, and make your game

Before we start, if you want a REALLY nice asset for your game, something really impressive, check out this, and remove your jaw from the floor.

How do you start a game for beginners?

You need to pickup either Unreal Engine or Unity, and start experimenting with it. At first it will just be like playing a game, but eventually when you get good enough at the engine, you can make your own game easily, it just takes practise. You can learn it in 4 months.

HERE’S A LIST OF GAMES MADE BY JUST ONE PERSON, you can do it, it’s actually easy.

What is the easiest game making software for beginners?

There are a lot of options, but I would recommend Unreal Engine. First of all it has blueprint, so you don’t need a lot of coding knowledge. Second, you’re better off focusing your time on an engine that will have long term staying power, instead of using something like Game Maker, which is easier at first, but ultimately is a lot less useful.

Building the foundation

I am just settling into my new home, and I have decided to sit down and design a game. Today we will be building the framework for a larger game. A good solid foundation, is what we need, something we can build on. In furtherance of this task, we will be selecting asset packs which are appropriate for the situation, and then build a working foundation, and test the deliverable.

Mechanics and genre

What kind of game are we going to make? Well, it will have to be something family friendly, so no gruesome shooting games. We will be fighting skeletons and goblins and other nonhuman things, we’ll start with skeletons. It will be a story based game, where you walk around meeting characters and talking to them, and they will send you on quests to fight goblins and find treasure and talk to X person and all that standard affair.

Asset Pack Selection

Because it is a role playing game, we will base it on Easy Survival RPG v2.5, however, due to the fact that their internal processes are secret, we will only report new changes, with no explanation as to how specifically they were built. I will also use a variety of environmental asset packs, and for characters I will be going with Daz3d. Music and SFX will probably be from Sidearm Studios.

Story

A boy named Nemo is on a ship to London, partway along the voyage his ship crashes, and he awakes on an island, as he swims to shore, he discovers he is in a strange land full of skeletons and pirates. He searches for humans, but he only finds skeletons, at least at first. One of the skeletons tells him that the evil queen has cursed the entire island, and all the humans there turned into monsters. The skeletons and goblins and seamonsters and eggmen and animals there, all wish they could become human again, but the evil queen won’t let them.

It is the boy’s mission to rescue the island and defeat the evil queen, and turn the monsters back into humans.

Characters

1: The Evil Queen

The evil queen was once a very beautiful princess, chased and sought after by all. She would sit in her castle every day, looking at herself in the mirror, feeling true happiness. But as she grew older, and assumed more responsibility, she became a cruel queen. Everyday she would look at herself in the mirror, and become angrier and angrier, tormenting her poor subjects. Soon nobody wanted to be around her. As she became an older woman, looking at herself in the mirror, she was crestfallen, and alone, she cried, for she had long ago chased away her 7 husbands, always looking for a better one. Finally a king from a foreign land arranged a husband for her, one of his older sons.

Their marriage was a cheerful rejoinder, and it seemed like things were looking up. But every day she looked in the mirror, and became angrier and angrier and angrier. Her poor husband, the King, became the favorite target for her aggressions, and much gossip was had with the guardsmen about his various inadequacies. But one day, when she was looking in the mirror, one of her many guards ran up and told her, the King is missing.

She eventually found out that he had returned to the foreign land. In anger, she sought out the witch of the cove, and paid her a great sum of money to curse the island, for failing her so profoundly. “there I have cursed them” said the witch, but I shall not tell you how. The queen had the witch sent to the castle dungeon in anger, and sat in front of her mirror, looking upon her now much older and wrinkled face. She grabbed the mirror and smashed it upon the ground. Purple smoke rose up from the shattered pieces of the mirror, and filled up the town.

All the humans there turned into skeletons and animals and monsters, and everyone was unhappy.

2: The Boy Nemo

Nemo was from Quebec, his mother and father were very wonderful people, and they loved him very much. His life was very happy, and he was always very good at school. But one day, his father got a job in London, and decided to move his family there.

Along the way, on the cruise ship’s voyage, the captain became sick, and threw up, he passed out. The crew looked desperately for the first mate, and eventually found him in the mess hall, drunk as a skunk, and sleeping. They tried to wake him up but he just grumbled profanities and rolled over.

The ship hit a large rock in the sea, and crashed down into the ocean. Nemo tried to swim to shore, but he passed out. When he woke up, he was on a strange island. Full of monsters.

Nemo met a skeleton who had lost his 4th rib. As he told Nemo about how sad this made him, Nemo decided to go find the skeleton’s rib. He had to fight skeletons who had gone mad, and he dusted them off with his sword, which he had found along the way. He brought back the Skeleton’s rib, which made him so happy, he turned into a human.

Nemo realized that by doing kind deeds, he could turn the skeletons and monsters back into humans, so he went to and fro around the island, turning the skeletons and monsters into humans.

Eventually after saving the island and turning everyone back into humans, he meets the evil queen. She is in her castle, in the highest room around, crying.

“Why are you crying? Said Nemo, I thought you were evil.”

The queen tells him that she is crying because she smashed her favorite mirror, and now when she looks in the other mirrors, she see’s nothing.

Nemo considers this, and searches around the castle for anyone who can help. He finds an old witch in the dungeon, laughing to herself. She gives Nemo a handheld mirror, which opens up, encrusted with jewels and diamonds. He brings it back to the evil queen and gives it to her.

The queen is so happy to have the mirror, but when she looks in it, she gasps. She is a young woman again. She thanks Nemo and sends some of her many guards to bring him on a ship to London. Which eventually lands at it’s destination. Nemo is a year older now, but indeed London is very wonderful.

Ok let’s build the foundation

First we open up the Epic Games Launcher, and we’ll select our asset packs, for now we’ll just choose Easy Survival RPG v2.5. Create a project based on ESRPG v2.5. And when it boots up, this is what you see when you press play:

As you can see, we already have an Island, ready to populate.

This asset has everything, a good quality character controller, a large variety of weapons and items, it has crafting, magic, research, gunplay, quest systems and dialogue systems, good UI, a solid gameplay loop, enemy AI, basically everything you need to make a game.

For now I’m just going to save and we’ll build our main character.

Building Nemo

Ok, we’re going to use Daz to make our Nemo Character, unsurprisingly. So first we boot up Daz Studio, pick a good character, get him looking appropriately like we wish him to, and ready for the game, and the result is this:

And here we have Nemo, our main character. He looks pretty cool, I think he’ll make a good MC. So let’s export him, rename his joints with the FBX joint renamer, and put him in the game.

If you need more information on how the export process works, check out this tutorial on character creation, and while we’re on the topic, be sure to check out our subscription service, it’s like Netflix for game dev tutorials, you can learn everything you need to know to build your first game with Gamedev.gg.

Import into the Engine

Ok and after exporting and renaming your character, just import the newly created file into your Unreal Engine project, and here he is:

I had to change the material on the cornea, because it never looks right on import.

Ok, and with that, we have our main character, we have a framework for development, we have characters, we have a concept and a story we can build on over the course of the game, with a beginning a middle and an end, so it seems like as good a time as any to stop.

What we’ll do in the next tutorial

In the next installment, we’re going to go through the process of adding a new main character to the game, and then we’ll start building story and quests. We will make the skeleton’s missing rib quest.

Next, we’ll make the intro sequence telling the start of the story, and we’ll add music to the game, and a transition from the prologue to the main game.

We’ll also get the player started with some simple weapons and their first taste of combat.

Looking forward to showing it to you.

Have a great night! I’m tired. lol.