Decan Walk in UE5: Aries I Post-Mortem
Instead of journaling about the Minor Arcana of the RWS Tarot, I’ve embarked on a 365-day-long game jam.
I started a Decan Walk on March 20th (the Spring Equinox), inspired by T. Susan Chang’s 36 Secrets: A Decant Journey through the Minor Arcana of the Tarot and the blogs of several others who have attempted Decan Walks.
Although I’m keeping personal notes on the experience, I decided to document my walk as a series of ‘rooms’ in Unreal Engine 5.1. Although I’ve done work in Unity before, this is my first sustained work in UE5, so it’s been very — crunch. Really, this first decan was a 10-day long game jam on top of the magical contemplation of the decay. And realistically, I’m embarking on thirty-six 10-day-long game jams, no breaks, no prisoners.
You can watch a YouTube video of the playthrough here.
Aries I — Magical Post-Mortem
To be fair, I didn’t really do much, magically speaking. I’m coming off of several tumultuous months and honestly didn’t have a lot of appetite for wrestling with Mars in Aries, or the Lord of Dominion (Two of Wands) for that matter. But I decided to approach this as a baseline upon which to build the other decans. I decided to embody the Lord of Dominion, but a gentler sort (hopefully one that doesn’t end in oppression). I surveyed the landscape as I found it, and began gathering data that will inform future (magical) actions.
In other words, there was little that happened this first decan besides tech troubleshooting.
Normally, I do invocatory drawings and poetry or prose to familiarize myself with a magical form, be it a god, spirit, or divinatory figure. But this time, I focused on textual research. 36 Secrets is my starting text, followed by The Picatrix, Regardie’s Golden Dawn, Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, and finally Waite’s Pictorial Tarot. I’ve explored this particular Tarot for — oh, shit — 30 years. Man, well, I just got the Old Feelz. But between Regardie and Waite, I’m hyper-aware of how much more there is to grok.
Aries I — Tech Post-Mortem
Not-packaging
Having done a few jams in the past and recalling (with only a little trauma) my first experiences publishing mobile apps in Unity back in 2015, I knew what to do first: take a starter scene and go through the cooking and packaging process for the intended target, and then repackage often.
So, obviously, I didn’t do that and just started building shit instead.
Generative AI Height Maps, and Terrain in UE5
I wanted to do this in Unreal rather than Unity for two main reasons: better environmental tools, and I wanted to learn Blueprints. So I spent several precious days wrestling with building the terrain, but knowing that would get faster for future decans.
At first, I tried using generative AI to create a height map for the terrain. And I was surprised by how much it just did not grok the height map. I mean — it kind of did, but not really. Ditto with bump maps and normal maps. Eventually, I asked it to generate a top-down aerial photo (plus a poetic description of Aries I) and got something I mostly liked. At first, I tried to use this directly in UE5, but eventually just built out my ground platform in Blender and used the aerial image to deform the terrain. I also ditched my generative AI albedo textures. I was thinking surreal, and surreal will happen eventually — but I decided to give myself space to just learn the tools.
Megascans and Photogrammetry
Next, I had a bit of A Right Time getting the Megascan materials working the way I wanted. Some imported in as cloth rather than shaded lit — it’s a mystery to me, still, but hey — bootstraps. I downloaded the Polycam app to try some photogrammetry and may revisit it later, but cleaning up both meshes and textures will take time. (Time I decided I didn’t have because — hey, remember how I hadn’t tried packaging an app yet?)
Sure, ten days is a long time for a game jam. But it’s very short if you’re also juggling a full-time job, family, eating, exercise, sleep, and the Diablo IV public beta. In any case, I much prefer to build my own assets in Blender, and I absolutely love the processes of texturing, rigging, and animation — but each of those will have to come later. I knew this one would be the jammiest of the decant jams, and remembered my hard-won lessons from other jams.
Mac Package
Six days in, and four days out, it was time to package (because I knew it would take at least two days to figure it out).
My first letdown was that there’s no WebGL in UE5. I mean — I get it. But I also don’t get it.
For a hot minute, I weighed trying to revert the project to UE4 (and headache my way through BrokenEverything) and diving into Github to find workarounds. I even considered rebuilding in Unity. But I only gave myself a hot minute to deliberate these things (a hot minute translates to about an hour in skiddie dev time).
Once a cool minute hit, I said “fuck it” and resigned myself to a Mac OS build. There were some minor hiccups, but it actually worked more easily than I’d anticipated. I ran into another wall trying to figure out how to build a windowed (rather than full-screen) package, but I’ll tackle that another day (along with making a Windows package).
Sound FX and Ambience
Building the ambiance was pretty straightforward, but attaching the footstep SFX to the mesh-less first-person camera turned into a two-day odyssey. I eventually found some tutorials, but, honestly, I resisted them for the first day. It seemed ridiculous that the blueprint would be so complicated.
But sound and time are weird, I get that now. I ended up having to follow the tutorial and now raise a glass to the gods of bits, bytes, and secs.
Animation
Besides the particle effects for fire and a quick blueprint for the “Aeries 1 -10º” rotation, I ran out of time for anything else. As art-tech identifiers go, I’d call myself an animator first and foremost, and this absence burns a little. But the level sequencer for animations stumped me and I was running out of time to 1) find and then 2) go through tutorials for UE5 on non-rigged animations.
Well, that’s a lie, making animations in the sequencer was easy, but calling and playing them in a blueprint turned out to be much harder than I thought.
Basically, I made a collider so that when the player ran through it, the yaw of the directional light (the sun) would rotate -5º as the player moved out of Aries I into Aries II. But calling this has just been — annoyingly hard. The directional light isn’t inside a blueprint, so that will be my next attempt, but — I may just have to hunker down and do tutorials.
(And I know, I know. The sun should be rotating by10º. I may go back and change this and make half the year night and half the year day. But I’m digging the sunshine, y’all, just let me be astrologically anachronistic for a bit longer.)
Looking to Aries II
My plan is to build the platform and walls myself in Blender, likely using generative AI to start the height maps again. I’ll also focus on getting animation working more in this second decan, and spend some time balancing the audio levels.
