So I’m a Unity dude by heart, or so I thought.

I love C# and the whole .NET Ecosystem and I hate unmanaged languages with a passion (because why should I care about memory management in 2021?). That’s one of the reasons why I never tried Unreal Engine. I just don’t like the thought of working with C++ (and I thought I needed to, lol). But I always loved the way Unreal Games look. You can always immediately tell if a game is made with Unreal if you look at the lighting and graphics. It’s just fucking gorgeous without much of the hassle you’ll need to go through to make something this shiny in other engines (besides Cryengine or Frostbite). So when my friend and uni colleague Sebastian from Sleeprunner Studios asked if I wanted to do a game for the Mini Beans Game Jam with their team (they make Unreal Games exclusively) I immediately said yes! Why not give it a go?

And I was pleasantly surprised. To be completely honest, 48h was definitely NOT ENOUGH TIME (this is funny because it was the Jams theme lol) to learn Unreal from scratch and I was more of a hinderance than anything else really. BUT it was really fun! I kind of ended up doing not much game mechanics like I always do, but focussed on the VFX and Post-Processing parts of the game. Working with Unreals Blueprint system was a blast and I now understand the people telling me “you don’t need to know C++ to make games with Unreal”. I mean Josef, the teams lead programmer, did do some work in C++ that I failed to understand, but that was it. The rest of the game was done completely by utilizing this crazy good Blueprint system.

The game we made is called REWIND and is a gorgeous 3D Platforming game with a time-stop-and-rewind mechanic. It’s super fun! Go check it out over on itch.

Working with the guys and gals over at Sleeprunner Studios was a blast! It’s crazy to think about the quality of the game they produced in just under 48h. If you ever get the chance to meet them or work with them, go for it! They are wonderful people!

So I guess I’m gonna check out Unreal some more now lol. I still love Unity (more), but…

Both meme

Thanks for reading! 🌟