ReOrient

My personal experience starting work on my first solo project from scratch in Unreal Engine 5

The Fellowship experience and my time at GDC combined with the continued rejection from my X (Unknown Worlds) and no desire or financial need to get back in the saddle with a new team, I started to feel the internal drum beats… calling me to start my own thing. To build my own ideas. To be my own boss. To become an INDEPENDANT GAME DEVELOPER. gasp

Also a little side note.. at this time my second son was imminent and taking on a new job only to take a month or two off for parental leave wasn’t really in the cards. Whatever time I could muster in the next couple of months could go into working on my next steps into independence.

With the power of Unreal at my fingertips, and my relative success and enjoyment of making my Dragon Form prototype game for the Unreal Fellowship, I wanted to start over with something completely new from scratch. Something with a small scope where I can take advantage of what I’ve learned so far as well as challenge me with expanding my skillset. I also wanted to work on something that I would like to play, using a topic I have interest in. And I chose… Orienteering. Essentially Orienteering is a sport/hobby where you run an outdoor course that has no set path. Just find checkpoints on a map using map reading skills and sometimes a compass (but no gps) to find your way. I’ve done Orienteering locally in Oregon at the Columbia River Orienteering Club (CROC) and enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s also a skill used in Adventure Racing which my wife and I tried once and may again in the future.

It’s simple really. A walking simulator in the woods with very basic checkpoint gameplay and a few maps. There are a couple of games out there that already do this quite well but are still in early access and appear to have been abandoned for several years. But even if I can’t make a game quite as good as what is out there now, I still felt it would be a good start for practice and portfolio.

I started with the character, diving into Meta Human for the first time and exporting a basic player model to replace Manny. Otherwise, to not slow things down I just started with the basic 1st person locomotion kit, and for a prototype level I just used the default open world map.

Next I focused on my core gameplay. I needed a blueprint for a HUB that would live on the map where you would go to start and end a course. I needed Checkpoint blueprints that would live throughout the level and could be assigned to a course. And I needed a Run Manager for the level to keep track of an active course progress and run time. With just a handful of blueprints and supporting files I was able to basically have a complete system for running any number of courses on any map. But was it fun? Well… no, not really. Not on an empty map at least. So I went forward with the next step… making my first open world level.

I did some research into how orienteering maps are made in case I needed to make a new map from a custom environment. I also found some great resources for map data of real world environments, including height map, LiDAR, official orienteering map style, and street maps, that I could layer over each other. I then picked a park that I’ve been to before and took some reference video and photos to try and replicate it. I imported the heightmap into a new landscape and created an overlay image to scale that I could use as reference for building out the park. I then found a whole free park set in FAB that I could use to populate my environment with everything from spline paths, to bathrooms and playgrounds. I added lakes and rivers, splines for paths and roads, some basic PCG zones for a variety of areas, and created a custom landscape material with auto foliage. This process took a couple months of off and on development with intermittent baby wrangling, and I was able to get about 20% done with the map itself, I decided I needed to move on to other areas of the development.

From a challenge through a discord group I decided to get a basic main menu functionality working and followed a small tutorial on doing that. Nothing fancy or creative yet... just functional. But now, technically I had a full loop. You can start the one map from the main menu, go to the hub and start the only course, complete the course and exit to menu… Games done! heh.

But is it fun? Is it still interesting to me? Is it “indie enough?” Is it worth my time continuing? No not really. This gameplay is more about speed, while I’ve always enjoyed going at my own pace and enjoying the sites. On top of that I have also been drawn more toward some other related hobbies and kept being pulled into more of an amalgamation of multiple ideas instead of basically a simulation of an existing sport. Specifically I also really enjoy Geocaching. That is another hobby where you find points on a map, except you need to use GPS to find a general location and then you hunt for a secret hidden box somewhere in the target area. Kind of a real life modern treasure hunt except the treasure is the joy of finding the secret box and writing your name into the logbook.

So I did some more research… perhaps there was a way to combine the two ideas with other concepts I enjoyed, like Cartography, Escape Rooms, Treasure Maps, Dungeon Crawling… and then I found something that really intrigued me. It’s called Letterboxing.