Our first day of the Game Jam started at 9:30 AM, so, naturally, I woke up at 6 AM. After a tired awakening, I showered, got breakfast, and hopped on the bus towards KCG. As soon as we got there, we meet with our groups. My group, Group 5, had some decisions to make concerning our game, such was gameplay and art style, but it was quickly resolved.

The Game Jam started with our team making a Google Drive and my long initialization of Unreal Engine 5. I was worried about this Game Jam because I had never used UE5 before (nor any of its previous versions) and I was hesitant about the use of Google Drive as version control. But, I decided to throw myself in the deep end for the sake of ease for the KCG students on my team who were used to this workflow.

I was put in charge of movement and character controls, but I also wanted to work on local multiplayer, which would be my biggest mistake. After getting some quick controller inputs working with the characters, I started working on the local multiplayer aspect. Unreal Engine 5 is pretty new, and there are a lack of videos and articles that could help me figure things out, and it’s documentation isn’t as helpful as, say, Unity’s. So, many of the tutorials and articles I saw were for Unreal Engine 4, which had many different systems that I had to try to adapt to. I was not a fan of the module-based coding and found myself very confused on how to actually interact with the “code.” So, I tired hard-coding it, but the C++ aspect of UE5 is to compliment it’s blueprint system, not replace it.

After several hours of trial and error and no success anywhere near, I decided to put it off and work on other things like collision and hitboxes. Luckily, one of my teammates, Kento, took off where I left, though he struggled just as much as I did. As I was putting together collisions, I, once again, ran into many issues, and time was running out. Eventually, I was defeated by Unreal Engine 5, and, Kento eventually explained to me that we were doing local multiplayer correctly, but the version of UE5 that we were using had bugs in that specific area that blockaded it from good use.

The Game Jam ended and I went back to the hotel, beaten and exhausted. Though, determined to learn UE5 so I could win the next round. Whether that happens in the time before the second day is questionable, but not impossible.