This game is actually the first project I made entirely on my own.
At the beginning of the project, I needed to come up with an idea that I could complete by myself, wouldn’t take too long to develop, and wouldn’t mentally overwhelm me.
So, without overthinking, I considered the mechanics I could implement easily in terms of coding and decided that a falling mechanic would be a suitable choice.

At first, I followed some tutorials to code the health system and the time-slowing mechanic. Since I’m a game designer, I knew what to implement first and what to add later. In a falling game, the primary mechanic is the health system, so I started with that. Then, I added time-slowing as a secondary mechanic. Instead of using custom movement, I modified the movement settings provided by the game engine to adjust jumping, sprinting, etc.

The most challenging part for me was coding the fall damage system. After that, I built a level using asset packs. However, I found the game too simple, so I used timelines and trigger boxes to create interactive objects with different functionalities. Some objects disappear when you jump on them, some rotate, some teleport you, and some make you bounce.

Later, I coded the timer, a pause menu triggered by pressing "ESC," a main menu at the start of the game, and an endpoint to finish the game. Since this was my first time doing all this, I personally found it quite challenging.

In terms of optimization, I learned how to optimize lighting and shadow LODs. Additionally, to reduce the package size, I learned how to lower the triangle count, which helped me achieve a lightweight and optimized game.

In the end, it took me two weeks, and I now have a finished project. I’m happy because I accomplished what I set out to do, and I gained valuable experience.

As for something I couldn’t do—yes, there was. I couldn't change the skeletal mesh of my FirstPersonCharacter because the animations would break, and since I had initially built the movement system based on the default FPS character, it caused issues. Instead of fixing the technical problem, I adjusted the game's story to fit the limitation.

For example, if you don’t know how to add NPCs to your game, you can adapt the story to say that your character is the last human on Earth—no one would question it!

Thanks!