Hey everyone
To catch you up on the last 1.5 years of development, please settle in and let me walk you through it.
I started with a rough idea of a game I wanted to play on the 14th of July 2024 (I made a note on my phone when it came to me and I have still have the note with the rough idea). From there I created my first ever Unreal project. I had no idea what I would name it so I simply called it Zombie. I started jumping into the project and I remember thinking "This is completely insane. I can not start working on such a massive game as the first game I make".
So naturally, I had another idea to start working on a story-driven horror game that was based around the spiralling that happens so easily when you have anxiety. Again I just kind of jumped into the deep-end by figuring out how the editor works, what blueprints were and so on. I kind of flushed out the idea a little bit and started building the world I wanted. After many hours of doing, scrapping, redoing I finally had some kind of basic visual theme. It was around that time where I though "If I'm going to spend this much time on something and learn along the way, why not just make the zombie game?". So I did what no sane person would do and just jumped into it.
And thus, Dwellers of Terra was born! Well...spiritually at least.
I actually could not come up with a name at all. I settled on the name We Fall early on and this name would haunt me until only a month or two ago (from writing this).
I created the game project on the 4th of February 2025 and from there I started really fleshing out the ideas in my head. The problem I had was that I had all these big ideas in my head, but I had no idea how to implement them. So I decided what I would do is to approach the development in a way that has always worked for me professionally - break the system into smaller parts.
More specifically in this context, I decided that I would have to "chunk" the game into "systems". Let me explain.
My though process was that the game would include a crafting system, reparable buildings, enemies and a playable character. So therefore the game can be roughly composed of these 4 "systems":
- Crafting system (putting items together)
- Repairable buildings (building states)
- Enemy system (enemy AI, pathfinding, attacking, etc)
- Character system (movement, camera, attacking, etc)
I then started exploring the idea of the crafting system and quickly realised that there is actually a massive system that I need to implement first - an inventory system. And while I started thinking of the inventory system, I realised that I would have to implement items first. (This is a theme throughout this journey lol) At the start this was slightly overwhelming, because it seemed like there was this mountain in front of me and every step I took, the mountain just kept growing bigger. However, after climbing a few mountains, it has actually become kind of entertaining to see how a "simple" idea is actually composed of an entire network of complexities.
Since I had no idea where and how to start, I decided to follow a YouTube tutorial by Lisowi on implementing an inventory system. I think the parts I followed were just over 2 hours long, but I think it took me a full week to complete. I started becoming more comfortable with the editor and with how everything worked together, so I started experimenting with making changes to the parts I didn't like or did not want, for example I think I added custom icons for the item filters and then at some point completely removed them and cleaned up all the data around filters. It may sound stupid, but doing something like that when you have almost no idea what is going on is very liberating.
This inventory tutorial also included a basic item setup with the ability to drop items. One of the other things I did was to make a generic "dropped object" (it was a paper bag at the time) because picking up a blueberry was impossible lol.
I think it was around this time where I decided that I should stream my map design journey as this might help with exposure and getting early feedback.