Dev Log Series Part 1

Welcome back, everyone. It’s certainly be a minute. I apologize. I had all of the video games to play and blogging seemed like such a drag. I’m back now, though, due to some inspiration given to me by my new manager at work. Let’s talk about a few things.

1. I’m not going to release any of the content from my previous post, if it was not already obvious. For what it’s worth, I had some of the posts written out, but I never published them because I didn’t think the work was good enough to publish. Whether or not that’s true or just my depression talking, who’s to say?
2. I have a couple of projects in the work, and I plan on posting more about those, plus some hidden ✨bonus✨ content as well. I’ll give you a taste below, but bare with me for the duration of these other bullet points.
3. I’ve re-done my site to use Hugo instead of Hexo, and I may end up re-doing it again with NextJS and/or Astro. Why? A couple of reasons:
   • The old site was so 2016, and we’ve had a pandemic since then, and I’ve purchased a lot of more sweat pants since then.
   • It was getting hard to maintain. Even though I didn’t post anything, I’d re-deploy the site every 6 months or so to keep the certificate fresh and everything. But the initial design and code was from 2016 and I couldn’t be bothered to npm audit that junk, so here I am.
   • While this is still kind of “the easy way out” for creating a blog, I kind of wanted a fresh start without having to completely re-write everything. Having said that, Hugo feels like magic in the same way Hexo did, so I’m going to eventually re-write this thing again so that this kind of stuff isn’t so black boxed to me. (i.e., Made with ❤ not 🪄)

Now on with the show

Okay, so here’s the part you’ve been waiting for. I’ll first give a TLDR, then I’ll post the stuff, then the long story below it. So, after the pictures, you can leave if you don’t care about the full story.

TLDR: I’m having a house built and in the mean time, I’m making it “playable” using Unreal Engine 5.

Front of the house Front of the house render Back of the house Back of the house render Living room Living room render My office My office render Basement Basement render

So basically, here’s the order of events.

• Pandemic hit, wife and I want to get out of the state
• We sell our house, “move” to VT
• We rent an AirBnB while trying to find a house or apartment for a month
• Literally nothing is available (wtf)
• We make the decision to move back to TN
• We look for houses for 2 months while living in an apartment
• Every house we get out bid and/or someone pays a million bucks in cash (wtf)
• We get tired of the rat race and decide, “well, if we’re going to be spending a bunch of money for a house, we might as well get our dream home”
• We find a builder and a neighborhood and get started a few months later after meeting them

After a few months of literally nothing happening with the house, we finally got the framing done and a roof. When the framing was going on, it inspired me to pick back up this project I started a few months prior, which was “I want to be able to see my finished house now.” So that led me to asking the designer for the 3D model files so I can chuck that into unreal engine and make something out of it. I’m roughly 75% done with it at this point, but as you know, that last 20-25% is the most amount of work. I’m really proud of the progress I’ve made, even though it runs like crap and doesn’t “play” very well. I still learned a lot working on it, and my wife seems to like it alright, so I can’t complain too much.

Anyways, thanks for reading if you got this far. I plan on posting some more dev logs about this project and a few more in the coming months. I hope you stick around for that. Take care ✌.