I hope you've all had a wonderful summer. Mine was great! So great, in fact, that I barely got around to chasing my 3D game development learning goals.

Good news for creatives and introverts though: it started raining today!

Feelings of guilt for enjoying life over the summer aside, I did make some significant progress! For motivational purposes, here's a list of what I've done:

• invested in a brand new PC for smoother development

• figured out first person game mechanics in UE5

• modeled a door in Blender

• opened and closed a door in UE5

• coded a keycard system for doors in UE5

• modeled clay figure bodies and heads in Blender

• learned about the existence of UV maps in Blender

• learned about messing up the UV maps in Blender

• eventually figured out UV maps in Blender

• created my own clay figure blueprint in UE5

• coded the clay figure to rotate towards the player in UE5

• randomized the clay figure head & body meshes in UE5

• randomized the scaling of the clay figure in UE5

• shamelessly shared my progress on Game Jolt

These may seem like baby steps, and they are, but they're powerful baby steps. I'm getting more comfortable with modeling in Blender, the UE5 workflow, blueprints visual scripting and prototyping first person games.

Finding motivation and not feeling overwhelmed by the learning process were some of my main roadblocks recently. Channeling inspiration into tiny prototypes and tackling small challenges along the way as I've done with these clay figures is valuable to me. It's giving me the power to create, experiment and learn new things along the way, which feels good! :)

End of rant. (stay tuned for more motivational updates and future prototypes)

Have a lovely weekend folks!
- Tim

P.S. The clay figure prototype was inspired by Antony Gormley's work: