Game 1 - The Clicker Day 0 & 0.5

Day 0

Initially I thought of building a game using Godot. I had a few reasons for this; it’s commonly used for indie projects, it uses a scripting language that isn’t too complicated, it is open source so if ever make money from a game it wouldn’t be complicated to figure out (looking at Unity’s canceled changes to their policies).

However, after doing a few tutorials, and looking for boilerplate code to get started I realized that Godot is easier for people who are good at coding - something which I certainly am not. I can learn coding (more than HTML, CSS, and the most basic JS) but I wanted to find some alternative to have a more visual experience.

That’s when I remembered that Unreal Engine has a visual scripting tool.

The best part of the Unreal Engine visual scripting tool, called BluePrints, is that the general layout works like a zoomed out picture of how code works - which is exactly how I think of coding in the first place. So at the start of this journey it seems like a pretty good option.

That’s when I decided to scrap my idea of using Godot and try to make this 2D clicker game in Unreal.

Day 0.5

I managed to find a few 2D tools for Unreal (which is largely a 3D focused game engine) but more importantly I found a clicker tutorial that I can follow to start to learn the engine.

The tutorial made me realize I should back up and learn some about the engine as well - so I started in on a Coursera course “Unreal Engine 5 - Blueprints Game Developer Masterclass” - I pay for the service so I might as well use it.