Hi everyone,

this is my first blog here, even though I have joined last year, so I will introduce myself first.

I am a software developer from Montreal, Canada, with a B.Sc. in computer science and I have some experience making games, but this is my first attempt using the UE4 engine. I knew practically nothing about this engine until very recently. I only had to read some tutorials and the UE4 docs and was able to partially create this game for the Dungeon Crawler Challenge without too much difficulty. I have some decent experience with Unity but I really feel that UE4 is a superior engine, allowing you to have much more control over your product. I was a bit overwhelmed at first by all the parameters, to be honest. 

So basically, my game revolves around a warrior character who is stuck in an "Underworld" type of series of dungeons. He needs to cross the 7 Soul Gates, scattered inside 7 maps, to ascend out of the world. Dante's Inferno was somewhat of my inspiration for this project. Each level has a boss to defeat. I will not say more than that. I am not sure if I will have time to make all 7 levels before the challenge ends, but it will definitely be a goal afterwards. 

Most of the assets were taken from the ActionRPG game example on the Unreal Marketplace. They just look awesome. I only took what I need from it and migrated it to a new project, which is a lot more lightweight. I was able to make one map, the AI for the enemies (goblin type characters), the basic game logic with all the damage taken and given, all the animation logic (state machines and such), HUD, health bars, and part of the main menu which has an animated material on it that looks rather cool (will post images later). All that remains now is creating all the loot assets, spawning loot and making the game logic for using the loot in different ways, and also for map goal reaching. 

Overall I am pretty satisfied with this project so far. UE4 is tons of fun to use. Much more than Unity in my opinion. I struggled a bit with Unity because some of the UI seems somewhat counter-intuitive. UE4 has a lot of nested menus though, which sometimes can make it hard to navigate and find what you are looking for. But I have adopted this engine and I will develop most of my games with it...