The Shattered Veil - How I Made This Far

So, I think this is an announcement post? I'm still getting the grasp of all this stuff...

I believe presentations come first. I am a computer scientist from Brazil who works on a full-time job for the last 9 years. Since I learned how to program, I am very passionate about the creative side of it. Naturally, I am someone who is very fond to the video game industry, as it caters to my interaction nature and my curiosity of how thing come to be in the 0s and 1s of a computer.

Since 2022, I have finally created courage to tackle the world of how video games are made. I have a friend who works with 3D modelling, so that was my starting point. Although I enjoyed a lot my learning time, as a 3D artist I am a very good backend programmer. So when Unreal Engine 5 was about to be released, I decided to jump in to make my dream game... Just to unceremoniously belly flop. As probably a canon event in every aspiring game developer, I had in my mind that I wanted to make the now long forgotten Scalebound. Yeah, aiming for a AAA game as someone who didn't even know how to navigate UE5's UI went just as expected. I still have that project though, someday it might become something.

After over-engineering a third person melee character with all the beginner UE5 tutorials and all my crazy mechanics that I asked myself if I could do, I had gathered a couple of free assets from the Unreal monthly selection. That was when I got this nice-looking mage character and a set of particles.  This character somehow clicked with me and made me start this project, which I now want to finally turn public.

The Shattered Veil is a third person action/adventure/rpg game focused on combat using spells and world exploration. As someone who resonates a lot with the design concepts of Breath of the Wild, Outward, Elden Ring and others, I like the idea of respecting the players intelligence and providing a well-designed and engaging gameplay loop. This is definitely not easy, and I have to admit that I have a lot of ground to cover until I feel like I am accomplishing what I am aiming to do.

As I mentioned in the beginning, I work on a full-time job and also have the normal human activities to attend to. There is no humanly possible way to say when this game will be in a production stage. I am enjoying the learning processes, the frustrations, the reworks, the bugs and the successes of this journey - to the point that I want to record it somehow for posteriority.

In the meantime, I hope I can transmit some of my experience to anyone who may be reading, and hope you can follow on this journey as well.