Day 3 (End) - I am migrating to CryEngine

So it is the end of day 3, and with it the end of my research period regarding the engine Amazon Lumberyard, my intention was to spend this time learning how to use the engine, and then tomorrow get down to build a first playable prototype of my game.

Research - Results

After 3 days of research and practice, all I was able to do was take one of the levels of the existing VR sample project, and add some code to spawn a ball by pressing a trigger on the controller, which will then be pushed in a certain direction.

Out of the 4 core features I planned to have in my prototype, I was only able to build 29% of the first one

And to make things even worse, after looking into it for a while, and making a few failed attempts, I came to the conclusion that, even if I were able to come to understand how to create the rest of the game, it is very possible I might not be able to create a distributable build for it to actually submit

Research - Reflection

I believe the main reason why I had such poor result, is that Lumberyard is an engine currently still in developed and released as a simple beta, there is very small amount of learning material for it, and since the engine is constantly receiving major changes, material realised even only two months ago is already outdated and was useless to me.

Research - Reaction

My intention was to use this opportunity to learn Lumberyard, as it was advertised to me as a more user friendly incarnation of the CryEngine, in order to later have an easier time learning Cryengine itself later on.

Even tho with 10 days left I might still manage to complete the game in Lumberyard, the scarce amount of learning material, together with my inability to create a distributable build of the game, creates too big of a risk for the project, I therefore plan to abandon this engine, and to migrate my project to Cryengine, which I also never used before, but that unlike Lumberyard is an officially release engine (instead of a beta), and therefore should have enough documentation and learning material to allow me to actually create a prototype in the time given, my planning as been updated to account for this.

FUN FACT: at some in the last three days I actually ended up looking up the documentation for Cryengine 3, the version of Cryengine on which Lumberyard is based, as some of that documentation is compatible with Lumberyard, I was told to referee to it since no equivalent for Lumberyard exists as of yet, I guess it ironic I ended up migrating to Cryengine completely