Flag Hippo Games

Spent the last month mainly messing about with look and feel. Not wanting to spend too much time nailing it down, but making enough progress that I’m happy I can move things in the right direction. I’m fairly pleased with the direction of travel.

Key things I’ve learned from this –

Procedural Foliage Generation – I had a hard time with this initially, but understand it a bit more now. I’ve not seen anything from Unreal clearly stating it, but it has the feel of something that has been superseded by PCG more generally. They’re slightly different use cases – I like having something natural being generated – but found standard PCG easier to use and see immediate results.

Scaling and PCG – this is still a challenge, but think I’m learning a bit more. I assumed a point was a point, and shouldn’t really control static mesh sizing. But after a lot of back and forth I’ve managed to get a better handle on it.

Lighting – Tweaked lots of settings, and it can massively change how things look. Certainly a few key items have me heading in the right direction.

Materials – I didn’t think I would get to grips with this at all, but I feel that I’m getting there. Not sure how much I’ll remember if I leave it alone for a bit. Still struggling with world alignment, normals etc – especially when I’ve built my own models, but I’ve got a much better handle on how to nudge certain material elements the way I want.

Next up

Want to get back to working on the train line and some rail placement logic. I’ve got enough now that I can create a couple of towns – so next slice of the game is being able to connect them using some rail building and get the trains on the track!