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1. Moving circle.

2. Platformer.

3. 3d shooter game with 2d engine

4. Real time action rpg.

5. 3d shooter game with 3d engine

6. 3rd person exploration game

7. more 3d action with less shooting

8. again 3d with more shooting

9. and again with less shooting 

10. and more rpg

It is pretty much using a 3d engine at some point. With Skyrim there is even a blur between first person and third person, as you can zoom into first person and out into third person. But the later games in your list are more about the story they tell. You could tell Skyrim in rpg maker. Or even as a visual novel. It would be very hard to mimic their core in such a short game as you plan it.

What you try to do reminds me of this game Evoland.

And what is "missing" are a lot of genres. Like puzzle or racing games.

With something simple as pong you could use your own things, but in complex game engines, many lifetimes of programming went into them. While you might re-create some aspects or a barebone version of it, you simply have not the time for that to finish your project. Of course you might use more advanced graphic libraries, but the line between libraries and a game engine is fuzzy.

Programming itself is easy and very hard. You just need to know what you want to do, and solve it within the capabilites of the given environment. So "cloning" something as an excercise would give you some guidelines what to do.

You could arrange those projects as minigames within a game. Or do you plan to switch engines for each project?

There are just so many game genres and mechanics. If you had some goal in mind, you might work towards it by picking out mechanics you would want to see in your future game and play around with them. Things like item and ressource balancing and having a combat AI are hard. Creating a puzzle is a different kind of hard. And creating an interesting level layout yet another type of challenge. All part of game development, but less of a programming problem. More of a game design task. And then there is of course story. The Elder Scrolls series did benefit from engine upgrades, but ultimatly it is story and the huge world and all the details that made their appeal.

More games you could recreate your own take on, as an excercise:

Slay the Spire. Cookie Clicker. Maniac Mansion. Tomb Raider. Worms. Flappy Bird. Plants vs Zombies.

Oh, and Diablo had no branching of any sorts. It is an action rpg. You chose how to beat the boss. Not if you beat the boss. Same for practically all the games on your list. There are no choices but how you level up your character or what tactics to use. Branching is more like visual novel territory. Dialoge trees usually just give illusion of choice, or you select wich upgrade to get. Or flavor for rpg. 

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Yeah, looking at it this way, that will mostly serve to teach to use the engine (Unreal for now) to make shooters and rpgs. Not that many genres, I know, I know. But I think I'm fine with that? They're kind of the two genres I play the most. But we'll see, maybe I get bored of making the same stuff after a while. Tomb raider and Flappy bird are both interesting for sure. 

And wow, I had never heard about Evoland! That's so interesting, it is indeed very similar to what I want to do!

In my case, the plan is to make a super short version of each of those clones and post them on itch as a standalone thing each. They won't be complete games, but more like tiny demos! Don't know how hard and time consuming that will be. Keep in mind I might just put and end to the challenge at some point if I see it's just not doable.

And since these won't be real games (at least not that I'm planning), but just practise tests, I'm thinking of using pre-made assets as much as I can whenever possible (like megascans for example). But yeah, again, we'll see how doable this is as we go.

Ooooooh and it's funny you mention cookie clicker because I made one a few weeks ago! It wasn't great tho and very incomplete...not even worth posting on itch. But it was good as a first touch at UE blueprints and UI widgets for a newbie like me...

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Doing those seemingly unfitting concepts in an engine not meant for it, will be great for learning. If you are familiar with Unreal, most stuff would be just level design and one shooter/hack&slay is like the other. Sure, game design is very important and all, but you mentioned to want to learn to code. Having Dark Souls mechanics is almost meta to all this. You could have a Dark Souls mod in Skyrim. And now that I mentioned this and had a look, of course, such mods exist already.

And if you did a cookie clicker in Unreal ... wow. Maybe probably I am mistaken about the capabilities of the engine, but a 3d incremental clicker game is something I do not remember seeing.

But maybe I misunderstood, and you do want to implement core principles via level design and event scripting. You probably aim to learn both this and coding.

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Well, not familiar at all with Unreal when it comes to blueprint and coding, but I used the engine a lot to integrate 3D assets. That's why I'm going with that!

I also haven't done any level design in the past. That's an other thing I'm looking to learn and practise for sure. This and scripting indeed.

And yes, Dark Souls combat in Skyrim would be awesome! Let's just say Elder Scrolls combat was never a huge hit for me (and for a lot of people I think). That's making it easier to clone I guess...we'll see if it's something I'm capable of doing when and if we get to the Dark Souls clone. Maybe I could then reuse that as a basis for the Skyrim clone.

But I did a bit of keyframe animation when I was in school and it was really, really time consuming. So I'm not super confident on that front. Hey, one more challenge to tackle, right ?

As for the cookie clicker clone, there's a ton of those out there! Just check Steam's last released games and you'll find new ones everyday. Wouldn't be surprised if a few were made in Unreal ;)