Unreal Engine 4 How to Make a Puzzle Game With No Art Skills

Puzzle games accept long been a staple in video games. From simple tile-matching or physics games to thoughtful graphic adventures with circuitous mysteries to solve, we've seen the genre evolve from Tetris and Myst to games like Rime, The Witness, and now The Sojourn. Adding a mysterious narrative to the pot, The Sojourn aims not only to confound players with its puzzles, but likewise takes players on a journey into its compelling plotline.

Created with Unreal Engine 4, The Sojourn drops players into a dazzling, ethereal world that'southward so much more than just its striking landscapes. Progressing through the game door past door, players are met with increasingly complex puzzles that cleverly build upon mechanics learned in previous stages. And just similar a carrot dangling on the finish of a stick, the cryptic yet fascinating story pushes the role player forward with an innate need to unravel the mystery remaining ever-so-slightly out of reach.

Speaking with Shifting Tides' Team Lead Aria Esrafilian, he fills us in on all the inspiration behind The Sojourn. Touching on the artistic process for creating interesting puzzles, he also delves into several Unreal Engine 4 tools and discusses how mastering those tools gave the team the ability to breathe life into a truly magical world.

Shifting Tides is a brand new U.k.-based studio. What was the driving strength in hitting out as an indie developer?

Shifting Tides Squad Lead Aria Esrafilian: It'due south an obvious answer, but we only love making games! The big question we asked ourselves when we started Shifting Tides was, "Is there a projection that maximizes all of our cognition and capabilities and eliminates what we know we can't do?" We all love puzzle games, and we felt the genre offered ample opportunity to practice something different that audiences would really enjoy. Our game designer started working on his ideas and later on testing some puzzles, we believed they had the potential we were looking for. Information technology wasn't that elementary, of form. It'southward taken us four years to get here and forth the style we've reiterated and revised near every element including the fine art style, the gameplay, and the narrative.

The Sojourn is a beginning-person puzzle game that'southward about the parallel worlds of light and night. Tell us how you practical that mechanic into the gameplay.

Esrafilian:

From a mechanical perspective, The Sojourn is all about this human relationship between the dark and the lite. How that human relationship changes and evolves is pivotal to our puzzle designs. At the start of the game, the dark earth tin be very helpful — it creates bridges and activates dissimilar powers — but later it also can create walls and be an obstacle in and of itself. As y'all progress, the mode you enter and get out this world changes and gets combined with other mechanics, and all of that feeds back into our narrative.

Where did your inspirations prevarication for The Sojourn? Were there any other games or experiences that helped influence the game's direction?

Esrafilian:

We actually admire what Portal ii did, and that'south what we wanted — a game where gameplay, visuals, and story are all in harmony. Not many projects accomplish this, specially in the puzzle genre. One that does is The Talos Principle, which combined simple mechanics to solve complex and evolving situations. We were also pretty much in honey with Journey and how its atmosphere conveyed various feelings in different stages of the game.

The globe you've created for The Sojourn is stunning. What was the nearly valuable tool in Unreal Engine four for bringing it to life?

Esrafilian:

Nosotros can't name only one. The whole engine was essential. Everything within Unreal Engine four is connected together perfectly and we were able to have control over everything nosotros wanted with minimal effort. For The Sojourn, our focus was on the art and atmosphere of the game: visual effects and environmental animations. For these, we utilized the Material Editor, post-processing system, Sequencer, particle organisation, audio system, and many others. The near astonishing part is how we're able to control and connect all of these using Blueprints. Even some basic features similar Fabric Collection Parameters saved us many hours!

What about The Sojourn freshens up the first-person puzzle genre?

Esrafilian:

The idea nosotros always came back to on The Sojourn is harmony, and information technology was really important to us that this feeling echoed beyond everything in the game. All the private elements needed to piece of work with each other and support everything else. We tried to give every characteristic of the game a symbolic meaning — 1 that could be understood on an emotional level, even if a player didn't detect or empathise it literally.

The challenges and the puzzles are not just mechanical, we want them to be most our ideas and lived experiences. We tried to do a lot of metaphorical and non-verbal advice with the histrion, which alludes to a philosophical perspective or concept we want people to call back about.

It feels similar The Sojourn is a natural option for a port into the world of VR. Is that something that you considered at whatsoever point? Practice you feel Unreal could aid in that task?

Esrafilian:

Absolutely! We actually tested the game on an Oculus Rift dev kit and a while later on an HTC Vive, and cheers to VR integration in Unreal Engine four, information technology was pretty plug-and-play. If the audience is there, a VR port of The Sojourn would be a wonderful thing to make, but we're not committing to annihilation concrete at this fourth dimension.

Did anyone on the team take previous experience with UE4? If and then, how did that previous experience aid in the development of The Sojourn?

Esrafilian:

Our whole team has used Unreal technology ever since the Unreal Development Kit was outset made available. When Unreal Engine 4 was released, nosotros immediately checked it out and we were blown abroad by all the new features. To exist honest, moving from UDK to UE4 was 1 of the highlights of our career considering it gave us the shiniest new toy to play with.

Tin you tell us about the creative process behind the puzzles in the game? How did you get virtually designing them?

Esrafilian:

Designing mechanics and puzzles in The Sojourn was a long and bumpy roller-coaster ride! Our game designer, Nima, took some of the initial designs and started bringing them to life on the whiteboard. He and then solved some puzzles and let us handle the rest. Everyone was involved, as we all enjoy playing with new mechanics and exploring their possibilities. He then started to prototype some puzzles in Unreal using Blueprints to evaluate his initial ideas. He started the game design with extensive, circuitous mechanics with many possibilities and combinations.

The adjacent step was to strip the features to the point where it had perfect balance and complexity. Nima realized taking this route was way harder, only it yielded more unique and interesting results that meliorate fit the design philosophy of The Sojourn.

What advice would you offer to someone jumping into Unreal Engine for the first time?

Esrafilian:

Don't be put off by its complexity. Unreal Engine 4 is massive. At that place are loads of parts and editors, enough for fifty-fifty huge AAA teams to become overwhelmed. The UX is phenomenal, nevertheless. You can discover all sorts of tutorials and starter content to learn from. On the Marketplace, you lot can leap right in and start playing with different parts to see and learn how they work. The prototyping in Unreal is unbelievably fast. At that place is no need to write a unmarried line of code thanks to Blueprints. With The Sojourn's evolution, nosotros worked a lot with Blueprints. Information technology gave us the equivalent freedom and power compared to large-upkeep teams so we could focus on our ideas first.

Where are all the places fans can become to proceed up with Iceberg Interactive, Shifting Tides, and The Sojourn?

Esrafilian:

You tin can follow The Sojourn on Twitter, along with our team at Shifting Tides and Iceberg Interactive. The Sojourn and Iceberg Interactive are also on Facebook and Iceberg are on Discord too!

• The Sojourn on Twitter
• Shifting Tides on Twitter
• Iceberg Interactive on Twitter
• The Sojourn on Facebook
• Iceberg Interactive on Facebook
• Join our Discord

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Source: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/developer-interviews/shifting-tides-creates-a-stunning-world-for-puzzle-game-the-sojourn

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