Author: TagoWill

Image by: UnrealEngine website

Last week I planted a flag. This week I have to start giving some content.

A quick note before I get into it: this blog is, at its core, a personal log. I’m documenting my experience, my ideas, and my journey as honestly as I can. I want to be upfront, this is an ambitious project for a solo developer, and there’s a high chance it hits a wall I can’t climb over. I’m not promising a finished game. I’m promising to show up every week and tell you exactly where things stand.

Let me start with the question I’ve already been asking myself: why on earth am I building a card game in Unreal Engine 5?

It’s a fair challenge. Card games live happily in Unity. Some of the best digital card games ever made were built in frameworks far lighter than UE5. There’s an argument (a reasonable one, I think) that reaching for Unreal to build something that is, at its core, about rectangles with text on them is like hiring an architect to build a bookshelf.

I heard that argument. I disagree with it.

The Alternatives

I did consider the obvious candidates.

Unity was the first thing I looked at. It’s the natural home for this kind of project. Unity have a huge community, mountains of tutorials, proven track record with card games specifically. But Unity and I have history, and not all of it’s good. The last couple of years haven’t exactly made me trust the direction it’s heading: a licensing model that left a lot of developers feeling burned, decisions that seemed designed for shareholders rather than the people actually building things, and a market that appears to quietly agree. For a solo passion project, I need to trust the foundation I’m building on. Right now, I don’t.

Godot genuinely tempted me. Lightweight, open source, a community that feels like it’s building something with real conviction. For a different project, at a different time, I think I’d be there. But it would mean starting from zero with an unfamiliar toolset, and I don’t have unlimited runway right now.

In the end, the choice was simpler than I made it sound.

The Real Reason

I know Unreal. Not perfectly but well enough that I can move fast when I need to, and debug confidently when things go wrong. Starting a solo project during an already uncertain period isn’t the time to also be learning the fundamentals of a new engine. I needed at least one fewer unknown variable.

There’s also Blueprint. Being able to move fluidly between C++ for the systems that need it and Blueprint for the logic that doesn’t is exactly the kind of flexibility a solo developer needs. I can write the architecture in code and wire up card behaviours visually without context switching into a completely different mental mode. That matters more than I expected it to.

But honestly? There’s a third reason, and it’s the one that feels hardest to justify on paper.

This game, the one I’m adapting, deserves to feel like more than a card game. It has atmosphere. It has a world. The aesthetic is dense and specific and alive. I don’t want it to feel like a UI exercise. I want it to feel like somewhere you actually go. Unreal gives me the tools to chase that, even if I’m the only one building it.

Whether I can actually pull that off is a different question. That’s what this blog is for.

Next week I’ll finally stop being mysterious about which game I’m actually building. I’ve been hinting at it long enough and it’s time to give it a name, tell you why it matters to me, and explain why I think it deserves better than what exists right now.

As always, if this is interesting to you, share it with someone who’d get it. And if you want to support the project while it’s still just a blog and a folder of C++ files, just buymeacoffee. Every coffee buys me another hour of not panicking.

See you next week.

Supporters

I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the following individuals who have chosen to support this project. Your contribution means a great deal and helps keep this work moving forward.

• Azahar Machwe
• Sara
• Elisabete
• Isabel

I wasn’t planning to start a dev blog this month. Honestly, I wasn’t planning most of what this month turned out to be.

Life has a way of reshuffling your priorities whether you ask it to or not. Mine got reshuffled recently. And somewhere in the quiet that followed, I decided to use the time well.

I’ve been turning an idea over in my head for a while now. There’s a card game I’ve loved for years — asymmetric, deep, with a cyberpunk aesthetic that never really let go of me. One side plays a mega-corporation hiding agendas behind layers of ice. The other plays a hacker trying to crack through it all. It’s one of those games where every decision feels like it matters, and the design is so elegant it almost makes you angry.

Nobody has done it justice digitally. So I’m going to try.

This is going to be a weekly log of that attempt — the architecture decisions, the dead ends, the moments where it clicks. I’ll get properly into the weeds next week.

For now, this post is really just me planting a flag. Saying out loud that I’m doing this, so that I actually do it. That’s what week zero is for.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, I’d love to hear from you. Would you watch a stream of this being built in real time? If there’s enough interest, that might be the next step. And if you want to support what I’m making before it even has a name, you can buy me a coffee — link here. It genuinely helps, and it tells me someone out there is paying attention.

See you next week.

credits:
Image by Garry Killian from Freepik