It was not one of those weeks where I got any big goals achieved. There is an endless amount of things I need to learn and take care of while I’m working towards the bigger targets. It’s also nice at least for me to take a break when something is frustrating me somewhat and tackle something else.
File Size And Clean Up
The main project I’m working out of is over 60 gigs and almost 40k files. I was nearing around 2 TB between everything including copies set up for testing, backups, and a bunch of other assets. Every day the project gets bigger, more complex, more difficult to deal with as a solo indie developer. While I have started to look into some solutions that will be covered in a different post if I end up finding something I like.
I went through my Unreal Engine Vault and removed about 100 GB worth of downloaded content, plugins, and some other stuff I don’t see myself needing any longer. Most of it was just to check out and some examples they have. Since all these are from Unreal Engine or the store itself I can always download anything I find myself still needing again.
I also went into the main project and gutted about 4 gigs and 2k files out of. Most of it was meshes and textures I did not end up using. In the future, it looks like I can enable a cloning plugin for migrating targeted meshes from my test environment over that will grab everything those files need. That will be one way I’m going to try and cut down any bloat and future cleanup.
I’ve also started to go in slowly and remove no longer used functions, variables, and other stuff. A lot of the things I did in the early days got me to a point that I could get to the next step and became obsolete. It’s just slow going as there have to be around 500 variables by now if not more.
The bulk of my storage has to be in full backups. I know there is a lot of stuff in the Unreal Project folders that if I just need it as a backup I don’t necessarily need it. Between their backups, autosaves, and some other stuff I can delete 20 gigs or so per hard backup and not have too much of lost time if I need to do a full restore from my file. I still am being careful but I felt like that was a decent saving in stuff those just don’t need.
While I don’t need to be doing full backups like I have been doing. I tend to clone the backups and have a couple of testing environments that if things go sideways they just get wiped anyway so it’s not important. There has been an instance where I’ve bricked something and just trying to get things to a point of recovery is beyond what I was willing to spend in time.
With the file sizes I’m dealing with, source control needs to be done at a local level for a particle point of view. My residential internet upload and download speeds are not ideal for some of the solutions out there that are more for game development. Some of them are also quite pricy. There are also just a lot of other programs and assets on the side that contribute to the amount of space everything is eating up.
Builds and Distribution
Thankfully the build I made last week comes in around 15 gigs and compresses down to 6.5 gigs. Unreal Engine has a lot of bloat in itself that does not come with built ship builds. That is also for now low enough to use some free options out there if I wanted to share the entire thing with someone. It’s not anywhere near an ideal state do to do so but it’s something I’ve been looking into.
In a couple of months, I expect it to exceed most free tier offerings in a lot of places for storing and distributing files. While some people use things like Dropbox Professional for their short term sharing needs. Three years of that is around $600 and I’m looking to be as cheap as possible. Not to mention it’s just more than I need for quite some time.
I have started to look into places like Itch.io. While they do have a hard cap of just 2 gigs if you are trying upload directly to their webpage. There is a reason for that cap as that is not the preferred route to go. They have a program called Butler and you are permitted to upload up to 30 gigs zipped for a game.
It seems like in the short term Itch.io might be able to facilitate some of my needs. They do have some rules in regards to using them. Also if I am only able to make this a single-player game without anything blockchain going on they would be the place I would release on to start.
On the higher end grade of things, there is AWS services. While they do have some free tiers to test out I don’t want to start using up those offers just yet. Dealing with them also requires at the enterprise level more legal documentation and having things set up on that end of the business side.
While a lot of these things seem like far off in needing to think too much about for now. Like everything, there is a learning curve and even in some cases, there is going need to be integration with to fully utilize. This is just one of the endless amounts of topics I look into and think about from time to time.
Particle Systems AND Spells
While a lot of stuff I’ve been doing this week seems to be outside of directly working on my game. I have also been putting a fair amount of focus on trying to learn to use the particle system for spells in Unreal Engine 4.
I think I got the basics now of particle systems that I should be able to muddle on through. I might even redo some effects I have already in a couple of maps since I know should be able to get more of the look I was going for. Before I was just modifying the particles I have by rescaling and changing options directly on that asset. That was without using the built-in particle system editor.
For June they had for free Advanced Magic FX 12 and 13 in the Unreal Engine Store. These contain particle effects with many of them looking like they would be great for spells such as the screenshot above. They are also far more complex than anything I’ve been dealing with. So they have been a great place to look at and play around with.
For now, I have settled with each class having 5 different spells. Having four different classes that will bring the total to twenty spells, attacks, and abilities to make. When everything is done I should have a single target, aoe, buff, and even damage over time depending on the class and the style of play I want it to have as far as spells go.
Hopefully, I will have spells and the skill tree wrapped up by next week for the first stage. I do want to have a lot more abilities and spells in the future. For now, there is a lot of unknowns and need to make sure everything works as I want it before I expand things out in the coming months or years on that front.
Final Thoughts
This week seemed to have gone by quite quickly. Most of it was just a blur and a lot of late hours. A couple of times I might still be grinding away to only realize the sun was rising and another beautiful day was about to start.
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Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar. Screenshots are from Unreal Engine 4.
