Game Design Principles and UE4 Materials

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Bill Kerney

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Published on August 18, 2021 4:39:22 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcbi4hmgab8

Duration: 1:19:48

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Today we talked about more game design principles, focusing on balance. Balance is one of those things that is really really hard to get right, and rarely survives first contact with your players. You then need to adjust, but not overadjust. In general, buffing is better than nerfing, but if something is just too powerful, you gotta nerf some times.


One really important skill to learn is balancing listening to your players (who will usually know the game better than you) with the very real possibility that they have a worse sense of balance than you, especially if you've been designing games for a while. A good test is to see if their suggestions for changes are as fun on the *receiving* side as the *dealing* side. And playtest, playtest, playtest. With both casual and hardcore gamers.


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We then went into UE4 and learned how to make a new material (right click in the content browser and choose new material), and we hooked up constants (which I later switched to be parameters, the difference in which we'll learn later) to set values for the base color (we were making a snowman nose so I picked orange, and later temporarily swapped in a carrot texture), metallic, specular, roughness, and normal map.


Normal maps trick us into thinking a model has more detail than it actually does by having light reflect off each point in a subtly different direction, which allows us to add small cracks and grooves to an object without exploding our triangle budget.