Let me tell you, this episode dives right into the wild world of Unreal Engine, where the host spills the beans about their chaotic yet thrilling journey of blending AI with game development. The main takeaway? It’s all about embracing the messiness of creation—because who hasn’t been neck-deep in tutorials only to wonder, “What on earth am I doing?” With a casual vibe, our host shares tales of overcoming hurdles, the sweet satisfaction of breakthroughs, and the frustrations of troubleshooting, all while sprinkling in some witty banter about the ups and downs of learning. We’re all in this together, navigating the complexities of digital artistry, and if you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the techy stuff, you’ll definitely relate. So grab a comfy seat and a snack (or maybe some candy, if you’re feeling cheeky) and join in as we unravel the magic and mayhem of game development!

Takeaways:

• This podcast dives into the chaotic yet thrilling journey of exploring Unreal Engine, highlighting how it can feel overwhelming at times, yet incredibly rewarding.
• Unreal Engine is not just a tool; it's a universe of possibilities that keeps us perpetually curious and engaged, even when we don't fully understand it.
• Engaging with AI in game development can be both a blessing and a challenge, as it helps guide us but also requires us to maintain a strong grasp on the basics.
• The podcast emphasizes the importance of personal connections and community in the creative process, reminding us that sharing experiences can lead to unexpected insights and growth.
• While tutorials can provide a roadmap, true understanding comes from experimentation and making our own choices, especially in a complex environment like Unreal Engine.
• Learning to use version control tools like Git can save us from potential disasters in our projects, allowing us to experiment without fear of losing everything.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Unreal Engine
• EPIC
• ChatGPT
• GeminiCLI
• Claude Code
• Codex 5.5
• Godot Game Engine
• Convai AI NPC plugin

Hello, everybody.

Welcome back to this Po.

What is this?

Candy.

Candy in my pocket, man.

What am I doing?

What am I doing?

Look, this is exactly what it is.

It's a candid, unscripted, very raw podcast where I talk to you about my adventures with Unreal Engine.

It's something that I hold onto, even though sometimes it doesn't really make sense.

But.

But I'm always very impressed with what Unreal Engine is capable of, and I just cannot get enough of it.

So I decided to create this podcast a bunch of episodes ago because I really had no one to rant this to about.

I do have friends, but I really.

I don't know.

Maybe it's odd.

I don't have friends that do what I do.

I've met a guy on.

On a kid's party.

He was not a kid, but a parent of one, and he.

He was working on a really interesting project in 3D that involved Lego blocks.

I need to get back in touch with him.

We're supposed to have coffee.

Anyway, he threw this joke on me that he thought will land, but it really made me think.

He said, well, everyone now does 3D.

And I said, no.

Really?

I'm coming from a UX design background.

What industry field?

I do UX design, product design for almost a decade now, and I could have said that exact thing about UX designers.

I feel like UX design is oversaturated, yet it seems like people say the same thing about other industries as well.

I'm not really surprised about that, but it just shows you how much in a bubble, we tend to live those days.

All right, let's move beyond the obvious.

Yeah, I wanted to make this little, let's call it, intro to all the new listeners who are just tuning in.

I've noticed a significant spike in the downloads, and I'm really grateful for that.

This podcast is meant to be small.

I. I don't know how I feel about growing a big audience, but I really want to maintain this little cozy, casual feel.

All right?

So I. I don't want to get overwhelmed by big numbers here.

Okay?

So if you are here by.

By accident, maybe it's not place for you.

I'm joking.

You're welcome.

You're welcome to stay if you.

If you resonate with what I talk about, please do stay.

My intention of this podcast is to connect with people.

Okay.

And people have been actually reaching out, which is so heartwarming.

I'm getting emails occasionally that really make my day.

No matter what would have happened that day.

I'm really grateful for all of you writing in.

If you feel like just saying hello or if you feel like you want me to call me out on something that I said, please do it.

Email is in the podcast and episode description.

Do it and I will respond.

It may take me a while, but I will respond to every email.

I will talk more about listener email because I did did get a really, really interesting email 2 days ago, I think, and I really want to address it.

It's just really interesting.

Designer creative person wrote in and yeah, I'll speak more about that.

All right.

So I've been away for close to two weeks, more or less.

God, I hope it was not more than two weeks.

My last episode explained that I fell into a rabbit hole, didn't it?

I truly did.

I combined AI with Unreal Engine and I could barely address things that were truly essential in my life.

Okay.

I was not sleeping enough.

I was.

I couldn't get away from the computer.

The house was a mess.

I have a child, so she was there on the top, obviously of necessities that I had to attend.

I don't work at the moment.

I'm unemployed since beginning of this month.

So, you know, there was no stupid job that would drag me out of what I fell into.

And I did fall into very exciting rabbit hole.

Okay.

I felt like I became a superhero.

Well, there were definitely some superpowers in play.

I felt invisible in this field of playing around With Unreal Engine, there have been always some hard stops for me.

You know, I would open.

It's easy to open Unreal Engine after looking at tutorial and just, you know, you open an asset pack and you start placing things around with a standard light and it feels like you're doing progress.

Well, yes and no.

Right.

The true complexity begins as soon as you want to make it more meaningful, I guess.

Enjoyable.

Immersive, right?

You want interaction, you want effects, you want sound design, some kind of animation.

And this is where troubles come in.

Right.

So for someone inexperienced, you typically go to search for tutorial that will guide you through this obstacle, through this challenge you've got yourself into.

And you know, I'm grateful for the embarrassment of riches on YouTube where you get to watch those endless tutorials that seem to be constantly updated to match the new version of Unreal Engine.

There is so many tutorials to go through, but whenever you do, I don't know if you share this feeling that, well, I don't really know what I'm doing.

I know that I'm following those steps and I'm arriving to the result that the creator of this YouTube video promised me I will get to.

But I really don't know what's happening.

Why am I using this node?

Why am I doing things that he tells me to do and I'm stuck with it for the last hour?

Let's say you don't really know what's happening and you're not really learning, right?

Like many people said online, when it comes to learning on your own, yes, you can look at tutorials, but then you should really do it on your own and you should really follow your own desire of creating.

And many people don't do that because they just want to get things done and they want to move on right where we're all in a hurry, apparently.

Now that has been my experience.

And the worst thing that can happen is you will get stuck because a portion of a tutorial is badly or maybe purposely, I don't know, is this some kind of a hack where you look at tutorial and a portion of the screen sharing is obscured or is sped up so you don't really know what happened and you cannot move beyond that step and you're stuck.

So it happened to me many times and yeah, it was very ineffective and frustrating experience.

So, yeah, it's a bit of a run here, but I wonder if you can resonate with that.

I wonder if this is a common situation, common scenario.

Now, for those last two weeks since I declared I had a breakthrough, I started to use AI with Unreal engine.

It's something I was kind of avoiding to do.

I'm with AI since day one, since it became mainstream.

I remember Chat GTP was announced and it was not a mainstream news yet.

I started to use it and I thought, well, wow, cool, I'll be using this to make a newsletter and I will.

Yeah, I will.

That's amazing.

It's such a nice little tool and I was so naive.

I thought that it's all what it's going to be, just something for text.

Well, anyway, you know the story, you know where AI, how AI evolved and where it went since then.

But yeah, I've what I was going to say.

We know that EPIC wants to bring AI into Unreal and there are Git commits.

I haven't seen those, but I've heard that they are publicly working on implementation of AI into Unreal.

And we know we've got this assistant that is quite knowledgeable, but it still cannot write code.

It can tell you what to do.

And it's.

I guess it's okay.

But you know that it cannot really do much, so I don't know if many people use it, but if you haven't checked that out yet, please, please do activate this plugin.

I think it's Assistant or something like that, and it may be helpful.

But what I'm about to tell you is something that really brought me a couple of steps forward.

And maybe I'm repeating myself from the last episode, but I will, I will reiterate, maybe update this information.

I will tell you what else happened, because many people, many, many things, many things did happen.

So, yeah, I started to.

To bring AI into Unreal on my own.

I think I said it before that my AI of choice is Gemini because it's unlimited nature.

It's a pain we start to feel.

For the last couple of months, those big companies started to be more rigid when it comes to AI token consumption.

And this is something that they were kind of hiding from us.

Or maybe those LLM models, they became more demanding and we just see the real cost of this stuff.

I feel like this is going to be a problem because the price will start to be prohibitive and it will be a norm that you need to be very careful with the way how you form your prompts prompt.

And Gemini CLI in particular comes to the rescue because they really.

They're really generous with their limits.

So you can comfortably paste entire output log and it will go through it, it will understand the error, and it will solve it for you.

I made a mistake of pasting output log into Claude and it ate half of my token allowance.

So, yeah, I don't think this comes as a surprise, but this is exactly what you should expect.

I hope I didn't lose you, by the way.

I think this is sort of common knowledge, and I'm just riffing on the pain we feel when we use AI in a more advanced way.

Let me look at my notes here.

Yes.

So the way that I've learned.

What I've learned those last two weeks was I realized there is a difficulty that is hard to go around.

I don't know if EPIC will find a solution for that.

The thing is, AI cannot read binary files.

It can read code.

There are two types of files in Unreal Engine Project code.

C and blueprint, which is.

I understand binary code.

Yeah.

Anyway, there is distinction into two, and I'm just questioning myself if blueprints can be readable from outside of Unreal.

Anyway, I think that's what it is.

It's C and binary code.

AI cannot understand binary code because it's just very abstract and AI cannot help you there.

And this is where AI will tell you to do things for it.

It will lead the way through blueprints, different menus, and it does it surprisingly well.

It knows the interface of Unreal Engine very well, and it's up to date.

Most of the time.

There were situations where it told me, oh, go to that blueprint, go to Details, open that section, and there is a plus button.

And I would get back to it saying, there is no plus button.

And I would give it a screenshot and it would say, oh, yeah, you're right.

In this version, they removed it and they did it differently.

What?

This is so cool.

So that's kind of point I want to make.

It does things for you.

It guides you where to go, but it also kind of teaches you about Unreal Engine.

It tells you what is the meaning of each step.

And if something changed, like I just said, it will tell you what happened and maybe it will tell you why.

Maybe it will tell you, oh, this feature is somewhere else in this version.

And if you ask it to be very descriptive, which is something I strongly resonate you do, it will be mentoring you.

It will not be only doing things for you, it will be mentoring you.

And this is just really, really, really useful.

So in the project that I'm working on, I've got lots of blueprints.

So it was actually a bit of a.

Bit of a struggle to, well, seeing how quickly AI can do things for me.

But then I would have to go manually through those tedious blueprints.

And then I realized, I remembered that there is also this.

You know, when you create a product, when you create a project, you have this dropdown and you can choose between blueprint or C setup.

If you choose C, AI will have a lot easier, better time working on your behalf because it can access all those assets.

The problem is your project becomes a black box that you cannot really do so much with.

Now you can make your project a hybrid.

So there will be a lot of C stuff that you may be capable of reading and editing, and good for you.

That's great.

But there might be some blueprints that you can edit if you wish.

So you can have a hybrid.

And that's really cool now.

So this is kind of a way to go fast through development while retaining some control, some agency to change things on your own.

A big pain in working with AI is that AI is not making changes through Unreal, at least for now.

We've got those features like a computer Use.

So I haven't tested that yet, but I think it's still fairly expensive in terms of token use and quite slow.

So it's coming like the AI application will be using Unreal through user interface.

That'll be also kind of amazing because you will see exactly how mouse is moving, where it's going, what it does.

That would be a great way to learn.

It's just like sitting next to Unreal Engine Master, right?

But Unreal, currently the way how I've been using it, it is using direct access to files that you've got on your hard drive.

And this is where this Gemini CLI comes in, right?

Or cloud code or Codex is if you run it through their application or through terminal, you can give access to files on a computer and AI can work with them.

So whenever AI makes any changes, it does it outside of the application.

So you should have your Unreal engine off and then when not only need to turn it back on, but you need to compile the project using vs, which is Visual Studio.

It's fine, but it takes some time.

And this is what brings me back to that rabbit hole, that extremely deep rabbit hole that I fell into because I would have something that I've been working on for like let's say one hour, something small, right?

And I see progress, but there are some tweaks that I want to make and AI does it for me and you know, it does it.

And then I need to compile and compile can take say five to maybe seven minutes and then you find out there are some problems, maybe some errors and you feed it back to AI.

AI realizes, oh yeah, we need to fix that, we need to change this and it does it, but then you need to recompile again, right?

So now you're waiting 15 or 20 minutes and then usually it's done right.

If you're using more capable model like Claude, latest models that are expensive, I've noticed there's a lot less friction, it does a lot less mistakes, so there is less need to compile stuff.

But again, you will run out of credits very soon unless you are on one of those fancy €200 or dollar plans.

So yeah, if you can afford it, do it.

If, if you are bootstrapping, go with whatever you have.

So yeah, so you intercompile and that can be frustrating and it can.

But my case was, I knew that, oh yeah, I'll go to bed in five minutes, I'll just compile again.

There was an error and one hour later, it's already 2am and I still don't want to give up because I want to see this feature ready.

So I keep on compiling, keep on improving this feature because I want to end day with closure.

It's not coming.

I make it sound like I.

It was not successful, but in this particular case, I was dealing with a very complex challenge.

I don't know if I should bore you with that, but I was creating those intelligent AI agents or NPCs within my game.

And I was running local LLMs, I was running local AI to power them.

So basically you have a choice if you want to have AI in your game, right.

You can use API, which is like a protocol of connecting with a server of your AI provider.

And you pay for this usage.

Every call you make to that server, you pay.

So your game will end up being expensive unless you want to run your local AI model.

And you can do that.

And for things like AI chat within your game with npc, local LLM are really good.

They're very sufficient.

And that's what I did.

So I was running my local LLM and I was running my local TTS and stt.

Am I saying it right?

So two servers converting voice into text and text into voice into speak.

So I was basically able to talk using voice with my NPCs and I could hear them back.

And all of this was running locally.

So I was trying to connect three AI services.

Oh, and there was whisper also to do transcript of, you know, whatever was said.

So there was a lot of things going on and I had to make them all talk to each other.

And there was a lot of problems, you know, a lot of things crashing along the way because, yeah, I guess it was a great way to learn about complexities of software development.

It was very ambitious setup.

I made it work, but I couldn't depend on it.

It would occasionally start, stop.

Stop working.

And I know solution would have been to just use API and get this off my shoulders and just pay for the service.

In fact, there is a really cool plugin called Convey.

They do it extremely well because they don't only do voice interaction, but they also do animation.

Your NPC can follow you.

The NPC can do things in the level.

It's extraordinary, but also very expensive.

Not ready for prime time.

It's made for, I think, closed projects because the service is quite expensive and it doesn't scale at all.

If you release your game with this, with Convey, you'll go out of business very quickly.

All right, so that's kind of what I've been Working on, you know, this open world environment that you can walk around and talk to NPCs.

And I created a storyline and the whole framing of this.

And I have to say my mind is blown completely when I'm just thinking what's possible in this, in this game, you know, I really love my project.

I've been working on it for two years, but I've been restarting it many times.

That's interesting anecdote.

Actually, at one time I think I was working on my project.

It was first version probably or second for a number of months.

And I end up having an error that would prevent me from starting the project.

It would just completely, you know, it would lock me out.

And I was going through a lot of documentation and tutorials and I was asking people on the forum or people at Epic through forums, I was getting some advice, but nothing worked.

And I had to give this project up.

I had to abandon it.

I had to start over.

It was completely corrupted and I didn't really have backups because the project was already like 100 gigabytes and I didn't have enough storage to store it on something else.

Like all my hard drives were already filled to the brim.

I didn't feel like getting like.

Even if you get your backup drive, backing it up is kind of a hassle.

This brings me to another anecdote I've learned about Git.

I'll talk about it later.

Let me make a note.

Git.

Git.

Okay, so yeah, I need to end this anecdote.

I got into a similar situation with my project and I recognized it and, you know, AI fixed it in 20 seconds.

I was able to recover my project.

But, well, water under the bridge.

We learn not only how to fix things, but we learn where to get a solution to our problems.

That's there's a knowledge and there's wisdom, right?

I guess it's kind of like that.

Yeah.

So I think I told you about what tools I use.

So.

Gemini Cli because it's cheap.

I use Claude AI cloud code because it's so incredible.

And now for the last few days, we've got Codex 5.5.

And then, yeah, I can confirm it is better than Claude.

It's also expensive, but I do like it and I do use it.

Now on another level of tool set, I've got the game engine itself.

You know, I love Unreal Engine because it creates those visuals that are becoming, for me.

They're becoming part of the story, they're becoming part of what a game is.

When I create this environment for my game.

I feel like the quality of light metahuman.

Although I know we can export it somewhere else.

The whole package, it's.

It gives me value I cannot get anywhere else at the moment.

So I use Unreal Engine and I am really glad I can.

But I do like to look around and few episodes ago I told you I've made a game with AI.

That's even before I connected AI to Unreal.

I created Game on a bus using Godot Godot game engine, which I've heard about a lot from YouTube.

I've never heard Godot said to me in real life.

That's how little of 3D community I've got.

Who knows, maybe this will change at some point.

I wish.

Anyway, Godot and AI are incredible because the game engine like I don't know how big is Unreal Engine?

My bet would be like 50 gigabytes, right?

Could be.

Could it be with all the plugins you need?

Like let's say right Now Godot is 50 megabytes.

50 Megabytes, right.

It's super tiny and super light now it does not produce as good visuals.

Although news I read yesterday.

Godot now supports hdr.

So very interesting and I've seen some renders from it.

It looks really, really nice.

So I don't know.

I don't know.

It's very tempting.

Now Godot and AI connect very well, exceptionally well because all of it is code and AI can just read everything and understands everything thing.

And you know, I don't know Godot at all.

It's quite confusing to me because it's unlike other stuff I've used before and I just never went around learning was never on the top of my priorities.

But AI was this agent between me and Godot and I was able to do.

I was basically able to do a game like FPP first first person perspective game with Godot using AI and it was super easy and super fast.

Now I'm saying all of those things, but I'm not really telling you how to do it.

And you know, I did get listener email that I really made my big.

Really made a big impression on me because this person introduced himself to me and I will not disclose who this person is because I don't think this person stated if they want to be public with the outreach.

But this person sent me the body of work, the portfolio on links and I was blown away.

Like really nice animations, really cool 3D stuff.

And I read an email very briefly and I jumped directly into portfolio and that's where I got stuck because I just couldn't stop looking at it.

It was really good.

But I recall that the person was interested in my adventures with AI.

And I will take this as a feedback, as a listener feedback.

And I will create a series of tutorials now that I know more.

And I can actually start building something I can share with others.

So there will be.

There will be a YouTube channel.

I think I've set one up.

The name is not obvious.

I think I forgot what it was.

I created some kind of a placeholder.

But I will set you up with some tutorials and you'll be able to follow my steps.

In fact, I think we could make a game with Unreal and Godot.

That's kind of what I have in mind.

And I will show you how I integrate those tools.

I'll try to do it next week.

All right, so that's coming.

Yeah.

I made this note to talk to you about Git.

Git is a standard for version control when you work with code.

I've never used this.

I've never used this before.

It was just very intimidating.

But it's really, really easy if you do anything with code.

If you're just learning, improvising, leverage this.

Please read ask your AI how to use it and just, you know, ask your AI to implement it because you can very easily go back.

Just tell your AI to do like a snapshot, add a comment into it and commit your git.

And then you can go back to a previous version if you messed something up.

Because it's so easy to mess things up.

In fact, this project I was talking about, you know, all those services making NPC alive, I got tired of it because it would fail me all the time.

And I decided to go back to a simple text chat powered by AI.

But I've removed audio component from it.

And you know what?

It's fine.

It's fine.

But the way how I did it was I went back to a previous git commit that I've made.

And you know what?

So basically it was like a separate branch of my work tree and I was able to keep all of those voice features aside.

And if I decided, no, I'm not going that way, I went back into a version that worked before this craziness.

Now this is something I didn't do with that corrupted project, you know, the project that I work on for a couple of months and then it all collapsed.

There you go.

I wish I knew about git.

I just thought it's more complex and more Sophisticated, that's.

That's my excuse.

Look, there's many things to learn, but I feel like AI makes it all easier.

But I don't know if it made things easier for me.

You know, when I'm thinking about it, it made me work faster, it made me enjoy it more.

And I learn about Unreal more than I ever learned.

And the quality of that learning is better than ever before.

You know, I'm not blindly following anything.

I can ask at any moment, what's happening, what do I do?

What is this for?

I can question AI, I can question those choices and it really feels like interaction, it really feels like going back and forth and it's just magnificent.

So, yeah, I want to share this with you.

I think this will conclude this episode.

And yeah, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

And if I don't hear from you, I will get back to you with some videos next week or so.

I hope you'll find them useful.

It's a feature that I was hoping to have my entire life.

I think a mentor, you know, it's like a personal pet peeve.

I don't think I had enough mentors in my life.

I don't think I surrounded myself with teachers that were good enough.

And it threw me into a trajectory that I didn't know I was in.

And the result is I kind of started to believe I will, I will never achieve what I really dreamed of.

But now I have a mentor that can really walk me through those difficulties and I feel like I can do anything, you know, like yeah, there will be complex systems like the one with the voice.

So there is last thing I want to say today and that would be kind of my next thing that I want to get into.

I would be taking some pre made code snippets, some functionality.

And with AI, I'll be in a lot stronger position to combine code assets that were made before and I can customize them.

It's not just a black box that I get from Internet and I can combine it to work with other stuff.

Yeah, I could probably design everything from scratch, but I'm not going to.

But you know, previously I would download.

I don't like a parkour movement asset, not asset, like a code pack or whatever.

And it would work.

And that's pretty much all I was able to do with this.

You know, I could run that parkour run and if I had to, if I would like to connect some guns, some weapons to it or some other effects, I would kind of struggle.

You know, I would find a tutorial to do it, but it's now I see how much complexity there is and how much this complexity can be elevated from your hands if you, if you use the right tool, which is AI.

So yeah, that's what I'll be doing next.

I'll be doing something highly interactive that leverages code that has been written before and I will see how AI can decipher all of those different code bases and make it work.

One very last thing I want to say.

When you work like that, you always need to be conscious of the structure and architecture of your project.

And you need to keep in mind that documentation and planning is very important.

You need to plan with AI what you're trying to build and agree on the architecture.

And you may not know what's involved, but just question AI.

Tell it what your expectations are, how do you want to scale it, what are the future features you would like to implement and discuss different ways of making it work.

You know, what kind of plugin, what kind of code infrastructure you should put in place.

Because AI will suggest something, but it's not necessarily the best thing.

So planning is very important.

Okay, that's all.

I'm going to end it at 40 minute mark.

I think it's a good, a good score.

Thank you for listening.

I, once again, I cannot thank you enough for being here and I look forward to reading your emails.

And if you want you can also send me audio.

That goes without saying.

And yeah, tell me if you'd like to be on a podcast or if you have something to correct me on or just if you want to say hi, I'm based in Berlin by the way.

So if you are near, if you're passing by or if you live here, get in touch and we can have something.

So take care, be well.

Bye bye.