About
Background
I come from an engineering background working in the Oil & Gas industry. During the last 12+ years in the industry, I took on many roles; with work ranging from designing and developing automation solutions, SCADA network / systems configuration and development, graphic design for industry brochures and trade shows, to documentation process management (defining, writing, editing, and approving technical documentation, project proposals, and industrial plant audits). I am also a certified Google Partner where I help various companies design their websites and market their products. My business development successes include helping clients increase their online visitors by over 700% and product sales by over 300%.
Concept
For those that have played the Turbo Tunnel section in Battletoads, we all fondly remember just how exciting and heart-racing it was. I have always wanted to recreate that feeling in a game. The initial concept I had in my head of my game is a simple side-scrolling mobile game that mimics the perspective of the Turbo Tunnel section of Battletoads. But as I continued to create proof-of-concepts in the Unreal Engine, the side-scrolling idea fell flat.
I decided to change the viewpoint to a third-person perspective (changing the perspective is surprisingly easy in the engine, which I will get into later). Once the camera was changed into a 3D third-person perspective, a vast amount of character and game design possibilities opened up.
I can now create an interesting 3D world with compelling 3D characters. And what better characters to create for my game than a cat and a red panda? I think it is a game that Imgur and Reddit will like.
Oil & Gas to Game Development
Transitioning from the Oil & Gas industry to the game development was difficult. With no education in game development or in 3D modeling, the only skills that transferred from my Oil & Gas experience to game development is my engineering skills. Although, my web design and marketing experience did help me in designing and creating this website.
For the first game that I create, it had to be simple in terms of coding and graphics; so that I can learn the many tools of game development. Trying to wrap my head around all the new things to learn, I spent a few months learning how to model in 3D, which includes learning the process of skinning, rigging, texturing, and the lighting process. Luckily, the process of game development itself was made much, much easier with the help of the Unreal Engine. The powerful engine also helped me in creating this website, as it allowed me to easily take the screenshots of the in-game assets for the marketing material.
Unreal Engine 4
Puyu and Mochi is a game developed on the Unreal Engine 4. Even on a mobile platform, the lighting features of UE4 help me to create a lively world. <!–UE4 has a great marketplace where I was able to obtain some assets that I needed to put together the world. –>Due to the ease-of-use of the engine, putting all the pieces together was very easy.
The Blueprint system is also an amazing tool to help me understand game development logic, as well as provided a way to learn all the powerful functions that UE4 provides. I want to extend a big thanks to Zak’s well-constructed and highly-informative UE4 tutorials on the official Unreal Engine Youtube channel. The tutorials are one of the best resource I have ever seen for any enterprise-level software.
The amazing work done on UE4 by the Epic Games engine team provided such an easy-to-use engine that even an engineer working in the Oil & Gas industry can create a game. I want to thank Epic Games for creating such an easy-to-use and powerful engine, which allowed me to realize Puyu & Mochi.
What’s Next
I love watching eSports, and as a 2200-rated Arena player on World of WarCraft, I really enjoy the competition aspect of eSports games. My next game will be a competitive game developed in the Unreal Engine. Please follow me at KARASU Studios to get the latest updates.
