Setback After Setback After Setback After Setback After Setback After Setback After Setback After Setback After Setback After Setback After Setback After Setback After Setback After Setback After Setback After Setback After Setback After Setback

I wanted to write something about this game, just to keep an archive of my thoughts or a "diary" of some sorts to remember the events related to a game I made, just like what I did with the previous two.

This game might seem like a cheap "game" uploaded to get a free course, and you would be correct in that assumption.

I was having a rough couple of months. I hate talking about this stuff, but I was in the worst place mentally and physically. Just generally felling terrible all around. I reached the worst possible state in a long time a couple weeks ago. I didn't have the energy to talk to anyone, play any games, listen to anything, watch anything, or do anything. I just spent it in bed most of the time. Then, GameDev.TV finally announced this year's game jam. I remember the last two GDTV jams. I had my fair share of setbacks in them as well. The 2022 one came at a time when I could barely move my hands from pain while in the middle of college exams (Building Upon Them), and 2023 came in an alright time, but I had a lot of setbacks while making that game (Ignore Them). I was happy working on both, so I thought the same might happen this year.

Setbacks... setbacks... setbacks... the main topic of this year's log.

First, I went all "Boohoo, screw my feelings and mental state, I am doing it anyway", so I started brainstorming ideas. I was slower than the last two years, as back then I came up with ideas within around half a day or so, this year I took over a day and a half to come up with something. I finally did. I started working with Unreal Engine for the first time, as I thought that this was a good time to use the engine. I knew about the UI and general functionality, but I didn't really make anything with UE before.

It was amazing at first. How powerful UE is, how it makes creating a lot of things that would take hours in other engines with a click. I spent around two days making the basics and the core of the game. Again, I was slow because of my mental state, I basically just made the very barebone version of the game's basics in two days, but I continued.

Then in day three... oh boy, day three... The first problem happened. I saved everything and tried to playtest. UE gave me an error that my GPU was out of memory or something, and then gave me a black screen. I didn't panic, as I have already saved everything and backed it up, and I didn't make any changes before playtesting. I reset my GPU using the shortcut, and I found that everything was still open and alright. I restarted my PC only to be surprised by the disasters that were waiting for me. Crash after crash after crash, non-stop, every time I try to use/open/change any of the files that were used in my current level, which was EVERY FILE. So, I didn't really think much of it, as I realized that the files somehow got corrupted from the GPU crash, "alright, I will just use files from my backup", I thought to myself, but Unreal ABSOLUTELY REFUSED to work no matter what I did. Everything I did in the project resulted in a crash. So, I deleted the whole darn project and started over.

I then start working on the project again, this time much slower, discouraged by what happened. You have to realize that around five/six days have passed and I only have four days left. Considering the normal size of UE games, it would take me over a day to upload an empty project. I really only had three days left. With nothing done. Using an engine that I had never used before. I started working, but then I had the GPU problem again. This time it didn't corrupt anything, but I just got fed up and stopped working on the project, as I thought that I just didn't have the energy to keep remaking it in case anything like this happens again, as not even backups work well.

I then came up with two "last resort" ideas. The first was to make generic zombie shooter made in UE using whatever tutorial I find, no matter how old and outdated it may be. The second was to make a """game""" where you can see how long you can stand holding down a button before your fingers tire out in Godot if I had less than a day. I never used Godot as well, but at least that one will produce a game that is much, much smaller in size compared to UE.

I found a tutorial and followed it and made the buggy mess that was uploaded here. I am not proud of it. I didn't want to upload it as it felt like a cheap way to get a course. But I was just tired... and said screw it. THEN Unreal Engine refused to package the game. Yeah, at first it worked, but the game was over half a 600 megabytes, so I disabled all the Android plugins, then it REFUSED TO PACKAGE! I spent a lot of time searching, then I changed some stuff in my VS22 installation then it FINALLY packaged the game again. Then I said to myself that I was done with this project. No matter what happens, I am uploading it. After I checked that the exe works, I deleted all the project files and uploaded the working one here.

I do, at least, plan on getting the UE BP course from GDTV, and use it to learn and bring my original idea to life, as I think that it is too good to pass up on.

You may notice that the original game name (That Despair of Them) is still used in the project files and such, but I couldn't change that without Unreal screaming at me, so I just kept it there for the time being. Yes, this game was originally connected to the other two games.