Getting Started

I want to make an Unreal Engine game in the vein of “Papers, Please”. The player takes the role of a Wizard in a world where Wizards meddle in world politics and take the form of an intelligence / counter-intelligence service. During the course of the game the player is confined to their desk, and interacts with the world through the documents on their desk and the NPCs that come to the office for face to face meetings. Through these documents and NPCs the player gets the sense of the goings on of the world outside and can piece together the bigger story.

I hope I can get a minimal prototype done by the end of the year.

I was thinking the first “minigame” to incorporate would be sifting through intercepted communication and sorting them into genuine or planted misinformation.

Since I am not an artist, I will start by finding some temporary placeholder models to create this office space. I will go through Unreal Fab to find free models that will do the job. I was thinking the very minimum is a stone wall, a wooden door, wooden table, a piece of paper, a closed letter and a book and set the scene.

The instructions and letter contents would be generated programmatically from templates so the paper, book and letter should serve as in-world user widgets. I plan to project interactable widgets on their pages.

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I managed to find free art for the table, papers, envelope and the entire room. I also found one for the wax seal for the envelope which gave me an idea to use the seal as one of the ways to identify the authenticity of the intercepted letters.

I set up a pawn which is basically just a camera at a tilted down angle and set it next to the table. I am pretty happy with the way it is laid out. I think I’m gonna set up a git repo and call it a day. Tomorrow I’m going to look into how I can display content on these blank pages.