My First Game Dev Journey: Week 15

Oh my goodness, this has honestly been a week. 

In last week’s post, I mentioned that I’d realised the scaling in my game was completely off. Everything was far too large and out of proportion, which made implementing music and sound incredibly challenging. Things weren’t triggering properly, and overall it was a bit of a mess. 

I’m not sure if I mentioned this before, but this project is for one of my final-year university assignments. It’s a challenge I set myself to better understand game development, but more importantly, to learn how to integrate sound into games using Wwise. With my deadline approaching, this issue felt particularly stressful, as it made me question whether everything I’d built over the past few months might need to be scrapped and restarted. 

This week, I reached out for help. My lecturer put me in contact with one of the senior game developers, who helped me work through the issue. I learned so much from this session and am incredibly grateful for the support. It really helped fill in a lot of the gaps in my understanding of game development, things I either hadn’t fully grasped or hadn’t even considered. 

So… I have both good news and bad news. 

We started by creating a new third-person level in Unreal Engine to establish a clean character setup, as my original one appeared to be faulty and wasn’t interacting with colliders correctly. During this process, I learned about the different types of collision and how they affect interactions within the game. This was something I hadn’t properly set up before, which explained why my character was passing through certain objects. 

Once we had the new level set up using the standard Unreal mannequin, everything immediately felt much smoother and more stable. 

From there, we attempted to port my existing game world into this new level and rescale everything by a factor of ten. However, this introduced another issue. Because I hadn’t scaled my assets consistently when originally building the world, adjusting them now caused everything to misalign, objects were floating, disconnected, and essentially required rebuilding the entire environment from scratch. 

While I know I could rebuild the world more quickly now with the knowledge I’ve gained, realistically I don’t have the time. My priority is the audio, which is the main focus of this project. 

My lecturer made a really important point, that it’s better to have a simple or imperfect game that sounds great, rather than a visually impressive one with weak audio. After all, I am on a music course. 

With that in mind, my game developer mentor suggested using a pre-made environment from the Epic Games Launcher. While this initially felt like “cheating,” I’ve had to remind myself why I started this project in the first place: to learn how to implement sound in a game environment. 

Coming into this with no prior game development knowledge, I’ve already learned so much, and I can see how this experience will support my work moving forward. If anything, this process has sparked a genuine interest in game development. Despite the challenges, there’s something incredibly satisfying about seeing everything come together, that feeling of “I made that.” 

After exploring Sketchfab, I found a cave environment that fits well with my project. I still plan to incorporate some of my own assets where possible, but this will allow me to move forward more efficiently. My next step is to implement triggers, refine interactions, and bring the

environment to life through sound.

Over the next week, my focus will be on fully developing and implementing my audio, and finalising the music for the project. 

See you in the next post.