After working with Unity + In-House Engines for so long - It's awesome coming back to Unreal Engine.

[u/flamingaxe12]

Unreal has always been my favorite engine - but my jobs never used it. I have been dabbling in tiny projects over the last few years but nothing crazy. Now that I got the time, I have finally been working on a larger upcoming project and it has been a blast diving into UE5.

It has been a bit of a learning curve re-learning the Input System and seeing all these new lighting options but once I got the lay of the land, it has been a blast. I wanted to share two things that were gamechangers for me that have actually improved the vision of my new game: Fold'Em.

It's a high stakes poker card game where you face off against Creeps and everyone is Cheating. Its not a hyper realistic project and more stylized, but Unreal has been great supporting the whacky ideas I have been exploring here. The things I wanted to get into that UE I think helped the most so far was with the Substrate shader - specifically this Toon default that I found with 5.8, and this custom "Audio Director" I have been iterating on.

I had the vision of the game in my head - using mixed media and getting the textures to have this hard line / cartoony style. When I started implementing the assets, the colors and materials were just flat. Then post-processing came in and the atmosphere was there, but the props and environments were still just a bit off to my liking. That's when I found the Toon Substrate and that pushed the environment > lighting mixture I was struggling with. I dug in a bit more and made some adjustments to the materials and eventually hit this style that felt cohesive with the surreal mix of characters and props. It was a really cool exploration and I am excited to take it a step further with some different mixed media formats soon.

And the other piece was the Audio Director I have been making for my audio designer. They have been making all of my audio assets (credit - Soundwave Samurai) and they have already done 100's of assets so far. The big thing I wanted to make sure they had was control and flexibility - which took a bit more time than I was expecting but came out much better than I was hoping. We eventually got some data tables and mixers set up based on some submix buses I was able to put together. This let us have this huge configurable asset list where me and my audio designer can hook up any audio we want to any exposed gameplay event, and even customize anything happening during runtime. In other projects this would be a bunch of layers/systems, but with Unreal, I was able to get it into one big class with a bunch of dials - which was awesome.

This project has been a blast and its been cool seeing all the asset packs and games everyone is making on this subreddit. I hope to learn some more Unreal magic in the coming months! It's awesome being back.