My First Game Dev Journey: Week 7

This week has been all about character development, and I’ve finally made a start on visually designing them too. 

To begin, I wrote up character sheets for both of the main characters in my game. I broke down the basics such as their gender, ethnicity, accent, personality traits, flaws, motivations, and general temperament. My game will feature two key characters: the one you’ll play as, and a companion who will guide and support you throughout your journey. 

I decided early on that I wanted a companion because it adds emotional depth and more narrative layers to the experience. Having two characters creates space for relationships, interactions, and storytelling, all of which help build a richer and more interesting gameplay experience. 

I’ve been working on the backstories for both characters and thinking about how they communicate and respond to each other. This is helping me lay the groundwork before I begin writing the dialogue within the next couple of weeks. I’ve mainly been focusing on the companion character this week. 

If you’ve been following my journey so far, you’ll already know how much I love creating Pinterest boards, and of course, that’s exactly what I did here. Once I had the companion’s character sheet sorted, I jumped straight onto Pinterest to gather visual inspiration. It’s such a helpful way for me to find a direction, spark ideas, and build the mood I want the character to carry. I also created a clothing colour chart that I felt suited the

character.  

I also spent some time experimenting with a site called Meshy, which I came across by chance during my research. This is my first time using it, but I thought I’d give it a try as another tool to help spark ideas and generate some early prototypes. I uploaded my Pinterest board as a visual guide and wrote down key traits about the character, then let the AI generate a 3D concept. It was a really interesting way to explore shapes, clothing styles, and overall personality before moving into proper character creation. 

As it’s my first time creating a game completely on my own, I decided to use certain plug-ins to give myself more time to focus on learning the fundamentals of Unreal Engine and Wwise. Anything that helps speed up the workflow while I’m still getting to grips with the basics is honestly a massive help. 

While exploring Unreal Engine, I came across a free plug-in called Metahuman, which lets you create highly realistic digital humans with customisable facial features, hair, bodies, clothing and more. Since discovering it, I’ve been really excited to play around with it and start building my characters,  it felt like the perfect tool to help bring them to life visually. 

However, I did run into a few problems when I first tried downloading it on my Mac. I was originally working in Unreal Engine 5.6.1, but no matter what I did, the Metahuman plug-in wouldn’t load properly. After some deep diving through troubleshooting threads, I found out that a lot of Mac users were experiencing the same issue. 

Thankfully, the latest update of Unreal Engine 5.7.0, seems to include fixes for this, so I upgraded and was relieved to finally see the plug-in appear.

Unfortunately, that excitement was short-lived… because every time I started working on my character, Unreal would crash. After looking into it further, I realised the issue is most likely down to my hardware. 

Metahuman ideally requires 32GB of RAM (especially on Apple Silicon M2/M3 CPUs), and my Mac Mini only has 16GB, which explains why the software isn’t too happy with me right now. I’ll need to do a bit more digging to see what my options are and whether I can make Metahuman work with what I have, but we shall see… wish me luck!