Hey everyone!
Today I wanted to talk a bit about the technology behind My Beautiful Paper Smile. Every game developer needs to know what tools to use to get a project done in the most efficient fashion that will also give the best end result. Different games have different tech requirements that can be met in a huge variety of ways, so here’s why I chose to use Unreal Engine 4 to create My Beautiful Paper Smile.
When I first started learning game development I was using the built-in game engine that came with the popular 3D modeling/animation software Blender. After about a year I decided to start searching for a more powerful and versatile game engine since at the time I wanted to make high-end shooter games for the AppStore. You know, games like CoD mobile that take hundreds of industry professionals to make? Yeah, I was planning to do that, but make it at least ten times better… Anyways, dreams aside I wanted to start learning a powerful game engine.
I did plenty of research and eventually settled with Unreal Engine 4. The main reasons for this were it’s speed, rendering quality, easy mobile development, and that it has the built-in visual scripting system, known as “Blueprints” (spoiler alert: I never learned traditional coding). So I worked on my high end mobile games for a few years, which of course never worked out, and then did some PC games. I started to get an itch for the horror genre, and came up with the idea for My Beautiful Paper Smile (Previous Post: The influence behind My Beautiful Paper Smile)
In the original art concepts, I wanted the game to be a top-down, unlit, hand-drawn game, similar to something you might see made in RPG Maker. I even looked into learning a few different 2D game engines. If I had gone through with that, the game would look sort of like this:
Frankly, I’m quite glad it doesn’t look like that anymore.
I had started sketching the textures for the game and decided to put them all together to try out some scenes and see how things would look, and while playing around with it, I found that the 3D perspective looked much better. After playing with all my props I had made, I created the first environments, the players holding cell, and the main lobby.
A little later on, I spiced things up more with some additional post-processing effects, better lighting, and some fog effects.
After prototyping the first five minutes of the game in this style in Unreal Engine, I knew I could use it for the remainder of the game. I was already used to the workflow, and the style that I was able to create in Unreal seemed stronger than anything I could accomplish with a 2D engine. Plus, since Unreal is as hefty of a tool as it is, it would allow for plenty of future expansion of the game, and give more creative freedom for all the grandiose ideas I might have going forward. All this, along with all sorts of smaller technical advantages made the decision to continue using UE4 to create My Beautiful Paper Smile, pretty darn easy.
So there you have it. Those were the main things that led up to the decision to use Unreal Engine 4 for the development of my game, and what a great decision it was! If you want to make a game someday, or have an idea that’s in early development, do yourself a favor; do a little research, look at things from a few different angles, and most importantly, make something awesome!
Until next time! Keep smiling :)
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