Episode 15
AI Coding in Unreal Engine (Breakthrough): How AI is Changing My Game Development
Alright, buckle up, folks! We’re diving into the wild world of AI and game development, where I’ve just had a breakthrough that’s turned my chaotic creative process into a smooth ride. Seriously, I’m talking about using AI to streamline my workflow in Unreal Engine, and let me tell you, it’s addictive! Over the past few days, I’ve cranked out features I’ve been dreaming about for ages, like a metahuman buddy named Auggy who chats back and triggers animations based on our convo. It’s like having a virtual sidekick who doesn’t just nod along but actually brings the project to life with personality and flair. But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows—there’s a bit of a tech anxiety creeping in as I realize I might be over-relying on this AI goodness, especially with the looming specter of potential costs. Still, the journey has been nothing short of exhilarating, and I’m learning faster than a cat on a hot tin roof. So, sit back, relax, and let’s explore how AI is reshaping not just my project, but potentially the entire game development landscape.
Takeaways:
- I had a breakthrough that made me appreciate my chaotic past efforts in podcasting.
- Using AI has transformed my workflow, making it way more efficient and educational.
- Despite my gaming laptop's limitations, I've pushed through and finally implemented key features.
- I’ve created a metahuman character that interacts dynamically, showcasing the power of AI in gaming.
- The NPCs I've added breathe life into my project, creating engaging interactions and stories.
- AI is becoming an essential partner in my creative process, and I can't get enough of it.
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- GeminiCLI
- OpenAI
- Claude
- Epic Games
- Unreal Engine
Contact me via cmonkxxx@gmail.com
Transcript
I want to share with you a bit of a update.
Speaker A:I had a breakthrough, real breakthrough, to the extent where I cannot regret publishing previous episode, because when I look back and I don't dare to listen back to it, I feel like I was too disorganized and chaotic.
Speaker A:But for the sake of documenting the process, I feel like maybe that episode before has a right to exist.
Speaker A:Because with that, the breakthrough is even more significant.
Speaker A:I knew that I was up to something, that this AI workflow, where AI takes charge, encoding, take charge in directing the efforts and creative direction, I knew that there is a way for it to work and I had no idea how far I can take it now.
Speaker A:I've been suffering from a lot of sleep deprivation for the last two or three nights.
Speaker A:It's basically so addictive, I cannot stop.
Speaker A:I keep on developing this project that has been on my mind for a year, a year and a half, and I've been extremely frustrated that I'm not really moving with it as much as I would like to.
Speaker A:In fact, I had to rebuild it two or three times, usually because the project, the environment would collapse due to amount of errors, a lack of optimization and underwhelming capacity of my gaming laptop at the time that was lifting the whole concept, the computer was just too weak.
Speaker A:My knowledge was incomplete.
Speaker A:I was basically just placing models, meshes, and I was heavily relying on some plugins to make things work.
Speaker A:But in the long term, that was not sufficient in my.
Speaker A:My attempts would just collapse.
Speaker A:So I had to start over many times, always supporting myself with tutorials and, you know, YouTube videos explaining how to do something.
Speaker A:And as much as I thought, well, I'm so grateful for this, this embarrassment of riches, as they say of tutorials.
Speaker A:But the problem with these was they would consume a lot of time, way too much time, and they would be often outdated.
Speaker A:But anyway, all of that was contributing to enormous delays.
Speaker A:And now for the last three days, I not only was able to achieve features that I always wanted to implement, but I also learn from AI.
Speaker A:I'm using Gemini cli, which seems to be very well calibrated to this kind of work because it not only guides me very clearly through the steps, it takes charge whatever I want it to.
Speaker A:So it can write scripts, it can write code, it assumes that I don't really know what's happening, and it explains to me what the implications are, gives me options, and I can always discuss with it what is the trade off, for example, what are the implications of one decision over the other.
Speaker A:It's fascinating.
Speaker A:I I don't think I ever had as informative time in Unreal Engine as I have now because it's very effective with both actual work, but it's also very educational.
Speaker A:So, you know, whenever I get stuck, I get to just very organically, through just normal conversation, I can say, hey, this is not working.
Speaker A:Look what kind of error I got.
Speaker A:Look at the screenshot.
Speaker A:And we can easily iterate and in this iteration, I get to learn how to approach this problem and Gemini, perfectly fine.
Speaker A:See solutions just perfectly so.
Speaker A:Over the last three days, let me tell you what I achieved.
Speaker A:I implemented following features.
Speaker A:I've got a metahuman who I can talk with using local LLM.
Speaker A:So it's free AI chat, completely private and secure.
Speaker A:It, it uses uncensored LLM model, so there's no censorship of it.
Speaker A:I can talk about anything and it's not restricted to any topics or any language that's kind of irrelevant.
Speaker A:But I thought it's a nice luxury, you know, and I like it because this particular, particular LLM doesn't have those lobotomized ways of approaching the answer, you know, it seem to be kind of rude sometimes.
Speaker A:It basically it has a character and I wouldn't be able to achieve that with, you know, OpenAI API or Gemini API.
Speaker A:It's.
Speaker A:It's a very satisfying experience to talk with uncensored AI.
Speaker A:Now moving on to the next feature.
Speaker A:This is something I'm working on right now, but this metahuman character, I call him Oggy, triggers different animations depending on what the conversation is about.
Speaker A:So there's a couple of metahuman animations that trigger depending on what I want Oggy to do.
Speaker A:So it's a very dynamic, lifelike behavior.
Speaker A:Couple of things I still need to work on is I need to bring in the lip sync.
Speaker A:So I want him to move his lips in accordance to words that are being spoken.
Speaker A:And also I would like Oggy to, to hear me.
Speaker A:Right now I need to write to him, which is maybe not such a bad way of interaction because it's kind of more stable way of interacting.
Speaker A:It's maybe not as natural, but we'll see about that.
Speaker A:What else did I achieve?
Speaker A:I've got NPC system working, something I've been struggling with last time.
Speaker A:So I've got around hundred of NPCs just walking around this Italian charming town and you know, the city feels just lovely, lively and engaging.
Speaker A:In the future, I would like to create some kind of a system of interactions with NPCs where NPCs can talk among themselves.
Speaker A:And I want it to become kind of like a system of creating stories, you know, where you've got a human in the center and those NPCs are pushing the human into getting into different intrigues and different behaviors, interactions resulting in interesting stories.
Speaker A:Because there'll be also interactions with the environment.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Another thing I came up with was this audio system where there are different items in the environment, like little radio receivers and they play.
Speaker A:They play audio.
Speaker A:And I really like that.
Speaker A:I really like how this behaves.
Speaker A:A simple feature that I was kind of too lazy to implement before, but it's really satisfying.
Speaker A:So, you know, I've got this cafe and in the cafe there are like normal noises of cafe, coffee machine and you know, crowd and street noise.
Speaker A:And then you've got those little widgets like a radio that plays something very intriguing.
Speaker A:Right now I've got Alan Watts talking about the nature of reality.
Speaker A:You know, since, you know, you're in a game and you're listening to a radio DJ talking about the fabric of reality.
Speaker A:I'm so intrigued by that.
Speaker A:So I've developed those features.
Speaker A:I think there was a lot of little tweaks I did also with AI that I don't care to mention here.
Speaker A:But I love the process.
Speaker A:It's a really satisfying process because again, I get to learn.
Speaker A:I don't just blindly ask AI to do something.
Speaker A:I've learned a lot about Unreal Engine.
Speaker A:I've learned a lot about my project.
Speaker A:And I feel like I'm not alone with it because I can bounce ideas back and forth with AI and I just cannot stop.
Speaker A:I know I should be doing other things right now, but I just cannot stop.
Speaker A:You know, that's so fascinating and so satisfying.
Speaker A:It feels like I'm playing the game where I create this world and.
Speaker A:And it's basically something I always wanted to do with it.
Speaker A:But I was stuck.
Speaker A:I was stuck because of this technological wall, the amount of information I had to acquire in order to do anything in Unreal.
Speaker A:So yeah, I love it.
Speaker A:I do love it so much now.
Speaker A:Something I'm becoming more and more aware of right now is that I take this AI support for granted.
Speaker A:What happens now is I'm using this highly generous Gemini CLI system, which is free in the Google AI subscription, but definitely overusing it.
Speaker A:I'm definitely using more tokens than Claude would give me.
Speaker A:I'm using Claude also.
Speaker A:And I'm exhausting credits within like half an hour.
Speaker A:My daily credits, or they reset every four hours, you know, but it's very inefficient, but it's more realistic.
Speaker A:And I'm worried that.
Speaker A:Hold on, I need to pause.
Speaker A:It's too loud in here.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker A:Should be a little bit quiet here, kind of.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So I feel like I'm.
Speaker A:I'm being very spoiled with unlimited, pretty much unlimited resource right now.
Speaker A:And there will be a point where Google will start to ask more, more money for the use of the tokens, AI tokens.
Speaker A:So that makes me a little bit worried because I'm creating this new way of working, and I heavily rely on AI, and at some point it may be like 10 more, 10 times more expensive.
Speaker A:So I have that on the back of my head.
Speaker A:The uplifting thread here is that there are local LLM models that are becoming more and more powerful and less demanding.
Speaker A:So it's possible that as I'm running my local LLM for chat with Oggy, I'll be able to use that, even the same LLM for coding.
Speaker A:You know, I say those things.
Speaker A:I don't know if those things are meaningful to you at all or not, but they just blow my mind.
Speaker A:And for so many episodes now, I've been ranting how epic is not releasing this AI assistant within Unreal that can write the code.
Speaker A:And I surely hope that this is in the works and this is coming out very soon.
Speaker A:I don't know if it's gonna be free.
Speaker A:I doubt it.
Speaker A:I feel like there will be some kind of a paid plan for AI subscription within Unreal, but what I'm doing now, it's a workaround and it works great.
Speaker A:Now, something I wanted to mention also, because it's quite meaningful for me personally, is my project right now.
Speaker A:It's a hybrid.
Speaker A:I'm using mix of blueprints and C. And it's kind of cool because C does the heavy lifting and I'm using blueprints for customizations that I want to make.
Speaker A:But I can see how my project, my next project will be completely C&AI will be doing all the coding.
Speaker A:I'll be responsible for art direction and project management, you know.
Speaker A:So, yeah, I'm thinking of starting a new project separate from that one.
Speaker A:It will be just a platform game, some kind of endless runner parkour type of thing.
Speaker A:And I want to do it entirely with C. So that makes me feel like it kind of addresses this anxiety I had years ago when I started to see that learning blueprints is.
Speaker A:Sorry, I've lost the word.
Speaker A:It's required.
Speaker A:I need to learn blueprints.
Speaker A:And I made so many attempts to learn blueprints and it just feels like complete black magic.
Speaker A:I cannot figure this out, I cannot memorize.
Speaker A:Feels so random.
Speaker A:I mean, there is definitely logic in it, but.
Speaker A:My brain doesn't work like those blueprints do, you know, and the worst thing is forgetting.
Speaker A:Forgetting what nodes you've got, what is the way to connect them.
Speaker A:You've got those Booleans and variables.
Speaker A:I don't know, maybe with AI I will learn it quicker than I thought I would.
Speaker A:But if AI will be the missing link, not for me, but for everyone, maybe blueprints will turn out to be something that will be gone sometime soon because it's just over complicated.
Speaker A:You know, maybe we don't need that level of complexity.
Speaker A:Or maybe, you know, AI will be writing those blueprints.
Speaker A:Currently it's not really able to do that.
Speaker A:But maybe in the future AI will be creating blueprints and we will be just customizing them.
Speaker A:Or speaking for myself, that's what I will be doing.
Speaker A:Anyway, I'm about to reach my destination, my home, my studio.
Speaker A:And you see, part of the reason why I'm recording outside today is as soon as I get home, I would sit down in front of computer and I'll be tweaking and asking AI to help me out.
Speaker A:So that's sort of the only way where I have my undivided attention and I can record.
Speaker A:But I will publish this episode right away.
Speaker A:I invite you to get in touch.
Speaker A:Email is in the episode description as well as in the show description.
Speaker A:And I look forward to hearing from you.
Speaker A:Tell me what your suggestions are, comments, remarks, it's all welcomed always.
Speaker A:Thank you for listening.
Speaker A:Take care of.
