Epic Games dev says new creators should build "gyms" to try out ideas

If you're a new game dev facing creative block, Epic Games' technical designer Sam Bass has some words of advice. With three decades in game development, Bass knows a thing or two, and he's sharing his wisdom online in a monthly series called Make Your First Game with Sam.

His second entry deals with development. His key recommendation? build a gym (you might also want one of the best laptops for game development).

In the second post of his series, Sam touches on challenges that beginners often come up against once they're ready to start making progress with a game. Sam suggests swapping prototypes for “gyms” for each core system: a simple “gray-boxed” environment that provides a focused way to test said mechanic and evaluate the effect of any changes."

"For instance, if you’re doing a platform game, you’ll want a gym focused entirely on jumping that is both your testbed and your model experience," he says.

"In Unreal Engine 5, you could quickly knock a gym together with the modeling tools. These gyms are also a great way to introduce new team members to the core concepts, give QA a solid testbed within which to work and—with a little spit and polish—could even become your demo or tutorial level."

He has a word of warning, though: make sure your gyms are representative. "If your jumping gym is an entirely different experience to your actual level design, it’s not going to be very useful, so make sure that both are going in the same direction," he recommends.

Sams also stresses the importance of setting goals to aim for once you have a concept. He says that these can change, but they help to give a structure to the process. He suggesting thinking about where you’d like to be in three months, six months, and then a year.

"Evolving goals are great, but make sure to watch out for random rabbit holes too," he says. "Maybe you watch a video on procedural generation and become fascinated. But is any of that relevant to the game? Does it help you make the game right now? If not, maybe table it for later"

When it comes to actual systems design, he says beginners should start with some questions: how will we implement them? how do we want these things to work, and how much flexibility do we want? This should help you develop your ideas until you have the framework for your system and the design comes into focus.

See the full post at Epic Games. You might also want to see our roundup of the most impressive features in Unreal Engine 5.5.