Create A Triple-A Game In Unreal

Part 1: Plan your project and gear up

- Rob Redman

So, you want to make a game? Excellent idea, but where to start? Before we get going with all the fun stuff like modelling and lighting, we need to get organised. Life will be an awful lot simpler if we set ourselves up for success. We could just dive right in and make trees, write some music and start filling a terrain with random objects, but in reality that will lead to a lot of headaches, stress and lost time, as you spend hours searching for assets, digging through random folders and so on. Not fun at all!

The first step in any extensive undertaking like this is to make sure you know what the goal is. In this instance it’s to create a AAA-quality game. That informs certain decisions, such as what kind of organisation our file structure will need. For example, if we were making a 2D side-scrolling platform game there would be little point in making folders for 3D models, or textures. To define these things let’s have a look at the top-level brief for the game. There’s little detail here but it sets the tone and tells us what we need to be making.

THE BRIEF

LLYR: A RACING, HORROR, FIRST-PERSON, OPEN-WORLD EXPERIENCE

WHERE

The environment is a moody bowl/valley with many rocky outcrops, grassy knolls and small coppices, surrounded by cliffs and impassable mountainside. As well as dust particles and various small fauna there will be strange abstract light particles, localised to be subtle track features. Hints of future or alien tech should be glimpsed to heighten the mystery. These will also be the basis for boosters and traps.

WHAT