[BootBox] New Release

I challenged myself to follow an entire workflow, start to finish, of game development in one day, using unreal engine.

2 days ago, I sat down and tried making something in GameMaker again. I had used it to make a game in a single day before, and thought of trying it again for a change of pace. These days I had been reviewing my lessons in Unreal Engine to learn it better for my upcoming project, titled 'SynthLaser', but I've had no significant progress in making the game itself.

However it was becoming slightly challenging to make a complete game in GameMaker in a short time. I decided that it would be better to keep focus on Unreal Engine instead. Then I had an idea.

What if I make a game within a day, but in Unreal Engine? I thought to try as simple of a game as possible, using a base template. I am familiar with the 3rd person template, and in it there's boxes you can kick around, which is quite fun. I had previously also packaged just the template itself, to learn packaging. My simple idea was, what if we kick the boxes out of the stage.

This sounded like an extremely simple project, no modeling, no arts, no physics, everything is pre-made. I just make the boxes despawn when they are out of the stage and keep a score of them.

Next morning, I got to work as soon as possible. As I built my game, it's development turned out to be a lot tougher than I thought, especially the score system. The main issue was each box was keeping its own isolated score, and there was no way to make them share this variable. Selfish boxes!

Making even the smallest of features in Unreal Engine were time consuming. And I am beginning to suspect that coding in c++ will actually be easier than nodal programming.

This took majority of my time but once it was solved, everything else was relatively easy. I did manage to make a stable playable game by end of day. I also learnt to compile the packaged game which was new for me. However I did run out of time before I could make a decent game page or marketing material. My page doesn't even have a cover yet!

Waiting for upload to the game page reminded me of assignments. It uploaded and saved just a minute short of midnight. Although even if I had been late, my development would have still been within a day, aka 24 hours, it wouldn't have been within that day specifically. So I do feel its quite an achievement that I developed an Unreal game within yesterday :D

As for the name, I was thinking variants like OutBox or BoxedOut etc, but it sounded too much like the outbox in emails. I decided on "BootBox" similar to 'beatbox' as you are 'booting' the boxes xD

All-in-all, I didn't manage to make marketing material or market the game within set time, nor did I polish the game nearly as much as I wanted to, but it was still a fun project that reached a good end. I have a complete and stable release anyone can install as a game, and it doesn't, in my knowledge, have any game-breaking issues. (Try to escape the stage yourself and see what happens!) The game page is also not too bad, I did manage to colorize it and have at least a screenshot.

I hope you enjoy this very rushed project and rudimentary game. I might give a go at polishing it further and maybe making an actual game flow in it.