Unreal Engine 5 is an ultra-powerful resource for game designers big and small. It's brought about improvements to notable empires like Fortnite, breathtaking tech demos such as The Matrix Awakens, and it's also bringing fans the tiny tyrant featured in the upcoming title Squirrel with a Gun.
Squirrel with a Gun is a third-person shooter meets sandbox indie game featuring a tiny friend/foe—the choice is up to players—in a sleek world full of fun, guns, and fur. Game Rant talked with Dan DeEntremont, the one-man powerhouse behind the delightful game, about his experience as a solo developer using Unreal Engine 5 to bring the squirrel to life.
It's Easier for Solo Devs to Make Games in Unreal Engine 5
Before diving into Unreal Engine 5, DeEntremont starts his conversation with Game Rant by reminiscing about his days working in Unity. When comparing his experiences with the two, he found that working in Unreal Engine is a much more streamlined process, and Unity is like the ultimate sandbox for programmers and artists alike. The ability to create every asset from scratch in Unity when developing one's own game is mighty enticing, but the flip side is that it's also incredibly time-consuming, especially for the solo developer. DeEntremont recalls that, while building and coding from scratch was a great learning experience, Unreal's blueprint technology is the main reason he made the switch.
"Unity is very open. You're building most things from scratch and coding it, which is a great learning experience, but Unreal has a lot of things that streamline that process."
Blueprints are essentially coding shortcuts that allow designers to plug pre-coded functions into the Unreal Editor while programming their game. In doing so, one saves time laboriously scripting each element. However, if programmers want to further customize their game elements, Unreal's use of C++ also allows for blueprints to be tweaked further to their liking. For DeEntremont, this feature quickly became the most enticing aspect of working in Unreal Engine 5 and ultimately his favorite altogether.
"The number one reason I moved to Unreal was a thing called blueprints, which is sort of a system where you're plugging nodes into the system and nodes into other nodes in lieu of scripting. I haven't really typed a word into Unreal at all."
Unreal Engine 5 Allows Access to Big Tools, Even for Small Creators
Upon visiting Unreal Engine 5's website, one is quickly inundated with a myriad of tools to help craft any personal project. For example, every month Epic shares new assets for free with the community, which DeEntremont says has been instrumental in helping craft the town. Like any of the other streamlined features of Unreal, these assets can be dropped in one's game and further customized to avoid a 1-to-1 asset swap.
The plethora of tools available to the community is one of the main draws for DeEntremont for working in Unreal, especially when it comes to one fuzzy feature in particular. The quality of the assets in Unreal are impressive, especially around grooming. When one sees up-close shots of the squirrel, it's possible to see every single little hair. This is quite a feat compared to the challenges and capabilities in the past around designing realistic hair.
"They started doing the fur and grooming stuff before [Unreal Engine] 5, but they've kind of made it a lot better. In addition to that, there was one other thing about it that I really was fond of: their character remapping."
DeEntremont also cites character remapping as one of his favorite tools to use. Another feature that helps with the heavy lifting, character remapping allows designers to take motion capture from anywhere and remap it to characters in Unreal Engine 5, allowing for diversification in animation without the grueling hours of doing it manually. At one point in the interview, DeEntremont even flirted with the idea of mocapping the squirrel, though sadly this will not come to fruition.
Instead, DeEntremont would use the built-in animation features of Unreal to bring the squirrel to life, though this was actually one of the earliest challenges he faced. At first, DeEntremont found himself banging his head against Unreal Engine 5, still wanting to flex his Unity muscle and build all the animations himself. But he realized quickly that, like many of the other powerful tools available to him, there were already animation states baked in, waiting to be tweaked and used.
"I gave them different states like running, jumping, and all that, then went in there with a Unity mindset of, “I'm going to start making my own system.” Before long, I realized Unreal has this great state machine already, and it's integrated with the rest of the system. So, it's probably the best idea to switch over to that one."
Unreal Engine 5 offers powerful tools to game designers from all walks of life. Because of the sheer amount of information Epic publishes on how to use the engine, as well as the endless pool of assets and plug-ins offered, Unreal is an easy choice for solo developers who want to make their own games. Unreal Engine 5 is a streamlined tool that is highly praised and can get the job done, from creative battle royale games to a squirrel terrorizing its neighborhood.
While Squirrel with a Gun doesn't have a release date yet, it is available to wishlist now on Steam.