Rebuilding Aetherbound in Unreal

I'm about 110 lectures into Stephen Ulibarri's Unreal Engine 5 GAS course. I just finished section 10, and I figured it's time to put a post out there talking about what I'm working on.

The plan

Aetherbound started as Project Shmup, a Risk of Rain-like fantasy roguelike I was building in Unity. I stopped before it became anything real. Instead of picking up where I left off, I'm rebuilding it in Unreal with multiplayer, and I'm doing the course first on purpose. Last time I duct-taped a game together and ended up trying to vibe code extra features to it and ruined it. This time I want a nice foundation. And one that includes multiplayer.

The plan is pretty simple. Finish the course, take the finished top-down RPG project, and use it as the base to rebuild everything Aetherbound had before I stopped, then keep going from there. The multiplayer part comes with the rewrite, since GAS was built with replication in mind.

Building to learn

I just implemented click-to-move, and I'm going to delete it the moment the course is done. It was a good exercise and it has no place in my game. That's kind of the theme of this whole run, really. I'm building things to learn them, not to keep them.

Where I'm at

The course has covered the full GAS stack so far, the ability system components, attributes and replication, gameplay effects, gameplay tags, RPG attribute sets, the attribute menu UI, and now gameplay abilities. About 26 hours of video to this point, and it genuinely hasn't felt like filler.

Diving in headfirst

I like learning new things, and I'm getting plenty of that here. If I'm honest I probably should have started with something lighter, but I'm diving right into all of it instead. Some of it is going in one ear and out the other, and I think that's okay. I'm going to get my reps in as this course goes on, and I'll have a much better understanding of what I'm working with by the end of it.

Coming from Unity

I really appreciate how much Unreal just hands you. GAS is crazy. It feels like I'm actually making a game, where in Unity I had to make everything from scratch. The spring arm on the camera comes right out of the box. Top down camera in 1 second.

I'm also liking the C++ and Blueprint mix more than I expected. Coming from a noob Unreal user, that mix feels like the right way to go.

The goal was never the course project. The goal is Aetherbound, in Unreal, with multiplayer, on a codebase I actually understand.

I'll end up posting about this when I make substantial progress in the course, but this will be pretty quiet until I finish it. I'm being fed a lot of the solutions to problems, so I don't get to think as much as I would like, not as much as I will when this is over and I need to convert everything to my previous state.

Just wanted to get a blog post out there talking about my current progress and where I'm headed with it.

Stay tuned!