Road to the first playtest

It is happening. It's alive!

I started the project in late November of 2023, thinking that probably in a month I could create a working prototype of this Hover Tanks idea. Nothing really ground-breaking, just a shooter game with the regular tropes that can showcase my understanding of UE++, the game framework, and the general use of Unreal Engine.

I've laid out my ideas in a game design document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12qMHWZei4ufgrzRA0GSoj6v8RO9yynfOPXvSdlB6k-w/...

And then I started working right away. I was able to utilize every piece of knowledge I've previously learned in this project, and of course I've learned a lot during this one.

Software projects are hard to plan in time and usually take longer than expected. This was no different; I wanted to create (mostly) everything in the GDD in a month, and it took two. Well, of course, I couldn't really plan with the parts that I had to learn first (like the "new" enhanced input system), the holidays took some time as well, and there was a full week of downtime because of COVID in the family. All in all, I think the time it took is fair in retrospect.

By the time of this announcement, with exactly 200 commits, here it is:
https://github.com/hattila/hover-tanks