Learning Unreal Engine by Building an AV Simulator

I’ve wanted to make a game for a long time. Usually I start with something way too big, like an RPG, and then I get lost in worldbuilding or making assets. Eventually I realize I’ve spent a lot of time working on everything around the game without making much of the actual game.

Graves is what I’m working on now. It’s a live-event AV simulator that I’m building in Unreal Engine 5.6. The basic idea is that you show up to a job, unload the gear, set it up, connect everything, deal with whatever goes wrong, run the event, and pack everything back up. I know that kind of work. I don’t know game development nearly as well, so that’s the part I’m learning as I go.

Right now, I’m working in a separate project called the Piper Character Lab. Piper is the player character. I’m using the lab to figure out movement and the camera system without constantly messing with the main project. So far I’ve been working on first person, third person, zooming, world-locked cameras, and a quick rear-view camera.

The image above is part of the Blueprint controlling all of that. It handles the camera movement, switching into first person, and keeping the rear-view camera from interfering with the rest of the system. It has gotten pretty big. I wanted to use it for this post because it is a pretty honest picture of what I’ve actually been working on.

One of my problems with making games is that I want to work on everything at once. I want to build the character, the world, the equipment, and whatever else sounds interesting that day. Then the project gets too big and I get stuck. This time I’m trying to slow down and get the basic stuff working first, even when it isn’t the most interesting thing to show.

The first playable version is supposed to be pretty small. One room, a projector, a screen, two speakers, a mixer, a couple of microphones, a laptop, and one or two problems to figure out. That’s enough for me to find out if the basic idea actually works before I try to build something much bigger.

So that’s where Graves is right now. It’s early, it’s rough, and I don’t really know where all of it is going to go yet. I’m going to use this devlog to share what I’m working on and what happens along the way.