Coming on to this team, one thing I had discussed a lot with the person who had been working on Way finder was to build the game in the unreal engine. There are several reasons for this, Using unreal engine in my opinion is one of the few ways to achieve the scope of this game in the time we have, the engine has various built in tools which would allow us to build the environment in such as short time. The engine has extensive landscaping tools that allow the developers to build environments quickly along with the integration of creating bodies of water to this landscaping tool which will also be needed as on the proposed game map there is a shoreline. Another amazing asset the engine has is the integration of Quixel Megascans which is a vast library of photographed scans of objects found in environments which is free to use for all developers using unreal engine as it is integrated into the engine.
Megascans library features many collections of assets, though there are two that are of note can be very useful when developing the games environment, these being the Icelandic collection and Nordic Coastal Cliffs as the game was proposed to be set in an Icelandic like environment.
Though I wanted to make sure I was certain to make this jump from Unity to Unreal, as even though I don't have extensive knowledge of developing a game in Unity, I do know the full asset work flow from blender to Unity's game engine. Below you can see two of the videos I watched about the developing process behind unreal engine.
The first video shows how the unreal engine helped lead to the release of Pychonauts 2 and how it was developed and shipped during the pandemic where a majority of the work force had to work from home.
Below is the video released by Quixel when they announced the incorporation of Quixel Megascans in the Unreal engine. The full animatic is created using Megascans and assets and textures along with being filmed in the unreal engine.
One thing I was worried about when it came to deciding to propose making the the game with this tool is that the game could be criticised for using a majority of someone else's assets, though I was reassured when I further looked into who is using this tool in industry including the newest instalment in the resident evil franchise, Star wars Mandalorian and Plague tales Innocence. One key point about this decision is that me and the other 3D modeller both want to focus on character creation, these characters will be in the style of photorealism so its crucial they are used in a world that is already photorealistic.
Unreal Engine 4 -
One other consideration with this choice of engine is to if we are either to develop in the pre established unreal engine 4 or to develop in the beta version of Unreal Engine 5. Below you can see a mix of screenshots and recordings of me working in the engine.
One first step was seeing how easy it was to get these Megascans assets into the game. Above you can see some screenshots from that process, overall the process is very simple though the download and export times can be a little long though overall there not to bad with a 4K asset taking around 3 minutes to export from Quixel bridge into the engine.
The next area I tested in Unreal engine 4 was the Generated water, overall it is extremely simple to build areas of water and to adjust the landmass it effects. Graphically the water is beautiful in my opinion and allows many in-depth options to edit the look, foam on the waves and the colour of water surface and the water depths. A way to see some of the potential of this water tool is to look at the game Fortnite which was developed in unreal engine, an image of the water in this game can be seen below.
Below you can see a video of me playing around with the water, using the built in 3rd person mechanic to see how it looks from the players perspective. I also play around with the lighting to see how that also effects the water.
Another thing I wanted to see was how Megascans assets also interacted with the water and how they looked along side them.
(A video of me playing around with the lighting and how it effects the dynamic sky clouds.)
Another new aspect to the Megascans is beta of their tree addon.
I wanted to play around with this feature as well to see how well it works in engine and around gameplay.
Below you can see some beauty pics I gathered while testing and seeing what the engine is capable of.
Unreal Engine 5 -
I then looked into using unreal engine 5 and the tools it provided. Unreal engine 5 is still in beta access though it has been out for a year, it has already got a lot of support from the community with a mix of forums and tutorials.
From the get go I think it will be a guarantee that we develop the game in this engine, one of the main reason for this is the heavy integration of Megascans in this version of the engine. With it being a matter of right clicking on the project inventory and choosing the Megascans asset you want for the scene.
The asset is brought to the scene with little to no editing needed in the material panel.
With in a couple of hours of working with the light, atmosphere and the Megascans assets I was already building a beautiful photorealistic world.
In my opinion this engine and the tools it provides are the best and really only way to achieve the scope and look of this game.
All renders are Realtime and where edited within blender.