I have been working on this game for a few years, and as time has passed, the options to build it have grown. Unreal has changed their pricing model to make learning and building with the tool much more accessible for broke and aspiring engineers like myself.

Initial game Design
From my mind to paper

Project Aurora has gone through a few iterations over the years. I came up with the idea while trying to think of making a puzzle game that makes sense in the real world. Floating blocks that disappear when lined up doesn’t pass the smell test in the real world, so what should I do? Put them in space! The final frontier and the only place where floating blocks makes sense. From there, things just fell into place—figuratively and literally.

Next came picking the engine. Originally this game was built with XDC, an engine that was presented by Xbox. After they moved away from that platform, I transitioned the game to the Unity Engine. This was a vast improvement, but it wasn’t doing what I wanted. So I moved to Lumberyard by Amazon. Since it was based on the CryEngine, I knew it was going to look great. Lesson learned: that was not the case.

Enter Unreal Engine. As soon as I transitioned the assets over and got things started, I knew I had a winner. After rebuilding the game so many times, the ease of getting up and running could not be ignored. The many resources also showed me that it would be easy to learn how to use and harness the engine for my joy. I have a lot to learn, but I can tell this is going to be a worthwhile journey.