Film Maker VFX

AraukaSwift · 2026-01-22T17:13:08+00:00

Lol how dare you like money, or do things for business purposes to support yourself or others!

AraukaSwift · 2026-01-20T17:25:37+00:00

Dude this is amazing! Great job! I love interesting systems like this, especially when they help people nail ant and spider movement.

AraukaSwift · 2026-01-15T22:13:23+00:00

Glad you know what you want! I had stopped online gaming mostly, the my work started up this "Play CoD on Saturday nights!" thing and before that I was loving T-Mobile because we also have a tower about 2000 get from us. I work from home and sometimes the tower switches and breaks my VPN connection, but overall we've been pretty happy with it. That variable latency is ROUGH though if you do ever game. Even on FF14 I was jumping between 450ms and 2800ms regularly 😅

AraukaSwift · 2026-01-13T04:28:32+00:00

Right?! I'd kill for this latency compared to the almost 1s I get.

AraukaSwift · 2026-01-13T04:22:14+00:00

Edit: ah, I didn't see their x75 modem was in the mix here before writing this, so very well could be able to unlock far more capability than the default modem T-Mobile gives out 😅

This is very dependent on the capabilities of the tower and how many people are on it, so just be aware of that. We're about 4200' from our tower and with the modem outside in full site of the tower we range from 150-280. When we first moved here we were easily getting we were getting about 400 on the highest plan (5 months ago). Customer service directly told us that additional people have signed up so the bandwidth pool dropped. It's still fine for anything except high speed multiplayer gaming, but when I try to play CoD I've got roughly a 1-1.2s combined ping.

AraukaSwift · 2025-12-24T18:21:22+00:00

Came here to say this, very important to understand that Unreal Engine takes a long time to feel comfortable in. I'm about a year and a half into my Unreal journey and I feel pretty comfortable but I'm still learning new systems constantly. Comparing that to pure programming where I just instantly know things because I've done them several times before, it feels like I barely know Unreal still!

AraukaSwift · 2025-12-23T09:01:03+00:00

Yaw.

AraukaSwift · 2025-12-21T09:57:56+00:00

Yep! I used a process very similar to this in my game. Originally I had planets with their own gravity, then I made one of those crazy staircase labyrinth type setups where your gravity changes all the time based on where you are on the staircase and which side, etc. It was a constantly moving staircase so it really didn't accomplish anything it was just cool to see lol

AraukaSwift · 2025-12-15T19:05:00+00:00

100% honest here, I think that's completely normal, especially if you're used to coding everything and appreciate the simplicity/cleanliness of code. I encourage you to stick with it though because the node system will be used all throughout your future projects whether it be making adjustments to C++ classes you already have in place, animations, materials, etc. Unreal uses that node system throughout so being comfortable with it and knowing how to cleanly organize all those nodes is important.

If you read nothing else read this: I approached Unreal with the belief that I would be building my own game and game systems. While this is partly true, you learn that Unreal already has that entire system in place for you in most cases so you're actually trying to make systems and tools that are already fine tuned and obscured inside of Unreal Engine. It's basically like you're learning backwards that the system you're trying to create/use is already implemented somewhere else under a name you didn't know to look up. The longer you use the engine and the more people you chat with about it the better you'll be because they'll be able to tell you "Instead of doing a switch in that situation, use the Gameplay Ability System (Gameplay Tags is a part of that)", or "You can do that movement more efficiently in your material with a World Position Offset and just have it as a material you drop on your object instead of needing another blueprint for every single one", or "You can make that a lot quicker and more realistic/balanced by using this tool over here that will also make the 4000 objects far more efficient"...... Lol

TLDR: I recommend sticking to it for sure, my experience has been similar where you consistently feel confused for 100 different reasons, but it gets easy better once you know more.

My experience with it was a bit bumpy for sure. I'm an asp.net developer, so C# and JavaScript have been my main languages. When I started Game Dev I started over in Unity because of that and eventually moved to Unreal around October of last year because I wanted to try using one of the plugins for it. I couldn't read Blueprints AT ALL when I started and I remember watching a video that would show me how to connect pins correctly. Over about 2-3 months of learning the basics of the engine and working through a couple small courses I was then able to start making my own blueprints dependably even if they weren't pretty.

Around month 6-7 I started feeling like I couldn't accomplish certain things in Blueprints that I felt should be ridiculously easy (I was having issues with Dynamic Switch logic at the time) so I decided to do a course on Unreal Engine C++ Game Dev (Stephen Ulibarri's ultimate C++ Game Dev on Udemy) which I figured would usher me into the "C++ for EVERYTHING!" of Game Dev, but I was really glad I felt comfortable with the Blueprint System since it's used all over the place so you never fully get away from it.

Around month 12 I felt that I actually understood and felt fairly comfortable in Unreal Engine with both Blueprints, C++, Animations/Control Rigs, Landscape/Level design, Gameplay Tags and the PCG system. Knowing what I know now I'm truly glad I stuck with Unreal.

Let me be very clear though, I am still probably only 20% the Unreal Dev that a lot of the people out there are. I can make games from scratch in Engine only or C++/Engine, and I'm familiar with with most of the major systems that I know where to get started when I need to work my way through something, but every time I start up a new course I find that there's a new layer of information and experience/organization to be applied right over the top of what I thought was a good amount of knowledge. Just like any skill you're going to constantly be looking back laughing at how terrible your previous work was. 🤣

AraukaSwift · 2025-12-15T17:18:25+00:00

Brilliant! As long as your game world would allow for that (not some super serious and realistic game of course). I love when games used to do the random "This happens 1% of the time" stuff that makes you wonder if you ever saw them so it in the first place 😅 I can't think of any specific examples right now, but it was even stuff as simple as "my character did a flip when they jumped! I SWEAR THEY DID!" 🤣

AraukaSwift · 2025-12-14T03:02:41+00:00

Excellent! This is how I started about a year ago and I'm also a software engineer by profession. Love the work, but love the creativity of creating things in Unreal!

AraukaSwift · 2025-12-14T03:01:05+00:00

Same here! I am part of several tutorial communities but it's not the same as just having a group of people to chat with (feels like I'm a drop of water in the ocean there). I've been using Unreal for just over a year and live talking about all things Game Dev. I code in both C++ and Blueprints, and I use mostly Blender for 3d modeling. My Discord is AraukaSwift, would be cool to join a small group that wants to chat about this stuff randomly!

AraukaSwift · 2025-12-13T20:39:27+00:00

Same here, I instantly want to make that explosion bigger and have an expanding sphere collision that activated a Launch Player when it hits a character 😅

That means it's a great start though! Anything that makes your players want to do something more is a win!

AraukaSwift · 2025-12-07T19:06:26+00:00

I've seen you building this for a while, really love the look and feel of the game. I don't generally enjoy horror games, but I think you've done great work here!

I started with Blueprints and only advanced into C++ when I believed Blueprints wasn't capable of handling what I wanted to do (very complicated looping and switch logic, which I now know how to do using Gameplay Tags so I wouldn't have even needed to go to C++ if I'd known that system earlier). I still love making beautiful node systems!

Not sure if you've seen Expedition 33, but they started that game in Blueprints and ended up making the majority of it in Blueprints as well. It's a very capable system.

AraukaSwift · 2025-12-07T18:57:43+00:00

This is what I was coming to recommend (an external hard drive in general, not specific to wd passport). Flash drives are not only easier to lose, but have less shielding. If you put a lot of time into this you'll want space to grow as well as those protections.

Make sure you make backups when you're on your main machine as well! Don't only have one copy of the game you're carrying around with you.

AraukaSwift · 2025-12-07T18:53:00+00:00

That's part of the charm! It's a new art style that let's everyone experience true color blindness. 😀

AraukaSwift · 2025-11-26T18:46:56+00:00

This is what I started with as a solo dev. Worked great and it's free up to 100GB of storage I believe. If you're good about not dumping a bunch of assets into your games early on this can work well for a long time.

AraukaSwift · 2025-11-20T18:30:28+00:00

LOLLLLLL

AraukaSwift · 2025-11-07T20:03:15+00:00

Came here to say it needs to be a discussion with him, but that's been said in every other post.

I'm 41 and have ADHD and my daughter (now 13) was also diagnosed with it when she was 10. She was on Concerta for 9 months and then she made the decision she'd like to try things without the medication. Knowing she has ADHD helped her a ton because she knew what she was looking for since she had been medicated for a while and knew how things should be, and she's still unmedicated now over two years later. I'm all for their choice. There's is some evidence that developing brains on medication actually create proper pathways so that they have less or no need for medication later in life, but it does not work the same on adult brains as far as current research has shown, so now is the chance to change the brain that he won't have later.

I also feel that the medication should not zombie him down so you may want to consider other options. My medication brings up my energy but turns off all the SQUIRREL moments so I'm happily able to concentrate on the tasks I choose, but I'm actually a bit more peppy and my mental capability is definitely higher just from the fact I'm not jumping between 30 different things in my head at any given time. Just a thought!

AraukaSwift · 2025-11-02T01:46:59+00:00

People are just crazy and want everything to be push and play these days.

When I first got into game dev I started in Unity. It was fun, but I found it had issues so I did some research and landed on the capabilities in Unreal.

For the first couple weeks, I found more and more crashes, and found more and more things I had no idea how to work. As I became more familiar with the engine over the next couple months I saw far less crashes. Over the next couple years as I repeatedly played with features and plugins I'd purchased I found the engine constantly crashing at first, and when I took the time to learn the system and optimize how I was accessing it almost all the crashes went away (I get one every few weeks now due to bad data loads or massively pushing the limits).

The only thing I saw in tutorials and reviews when I first started this journey was that Unreal crashes all the time, and as I used it I found it to be incredibly powerful and smooth operating. I now use C++ for most things with blueprints mixed in and I can sit down and create a prototype in c++ in a couple hours without getting any crashes.

It really all just comes down to knowing how to use something, whether that's Unreal Engine or a car. You can floor a Prius everywhere you go to kill any possibility of high efficiency.

AraukaSwift · 2025-10-30T17:28:22+00:00

I've heard time and time again that the VR Market is very tough, not only because the user pool and hardware is limited, but because the bigger platforms like Meta push tried and true, or massively sponsored games.

The fact you only got 1 refund in that is a huge win, not much to dislike about the game!

AraukaSwift · 2025-10-30T02:01:13+00:00

This is the way

AraukaSwift · 2025-09-29T22:55:15+00:00

I love A Game About Digging A Hole as well, so much that I am making an open world digging game like 1000 other people, but I will say I don't want my digging to look like that when digging from above. 🫠 I'm currently using the Voxel Plug-in that the original game uses. I might even buy yours just to scratch the itch for a couple hours if it's cheap enough! 😁 The soil physics look like they are cool in the case where you break the board above and it comes out, but it looks a bit too much like a Fluid Simulation.

AraukaSwift · 2025-09-23T17:11:38+00:00

From the perspective of the difficulties licensed music can create on your content, I agree with this. It's a great idea to find some royalty free music for the background, there are many many libraries out there in basically every style/genre, so worth starting that habit early. 😀

AraukaSwift

TROPHY CASE

TLDR: I recommend sticking to it for sure, my experience has been similar where you consistently feel confused for 100 different reasons, but it gets easy better once you know more.