Hello there! It had been a long time since I had taken the time to build an interior level with Unreal, so I thought I'd use the latest engine, 4.25 at the moment, and an asset pack from the Marketplace to build something for my portfolio. 

I picked the HQ Residential House by NOTLonely. I've seen it used many times already, but it's still a great pack. I've set myself the limitation of reusing the exterior shell, so I had to do with the existing windows and exterior doors placement. It was very hard to be creative using the existing walls, ceilings and floors meshes, so I've slapped the existing textures on BSP instead. It's still very rough right now. The main furniture is there, but it lacks some decor to make it feel lived in. As I integrate the gameplay, the layout is subject to change. 

I didn't think of testing the whole pipeline early and the house was almost complete when I discovered that for some reason I couldn't make the light baking swarm work in Unreal 4.25. No problem with 4.24,  but I didn't want to restart from scratch and so... I've set everything to dynamic lighting and turns out the framerate is totally acceptable!

Of course it didn't take long to think it would be a shame not to make a game out of it, so I'm getting familiar with the Horror Engine and the awesome community supporting it. If I had known that there was an improved version called HEReloaded running on Unreal 4.24 I would've used it! Oh well, next first-person game I will!

So far the only integration of the Horror Engine I've done apart from the player character is to set all the lights to interrupters. So for now that's pretty much all that you can do, open doors pressing "E" and turn lights on and off by left-clicking on interrupters. Oh and also, you can pick-up TV Remotes, turn on and off the TVs by left-clicking and changing channel by right-clicking. Those videos are from the Horror Engine and are complete placeholders.

Next step will be to integrate the doors from Horror Engine. This will make it easy to have doors unlocked using keys and stuff.

Next post should be about the concept of the game. Stay tuned!