Citizen is an idea I had been cooking in my head for a while. I don't want to say too much about it now and instead prefer to focus on bringing it to life in Unreal so it could be experienced rather than described. One of the best things about studying game development at somewhere like Abertay was the chance to find companions for such ambitious journeys and I have been lucky to find some. So, in late February 2025, I shared my idea and drive to bring it to life with Dom and we are now both working on bringing this story to life. 

I am cherishing this as a great chance to learn more about blueprinting and gain more hands on experience with the real design challenges that you face when making games. Currently at a very early stage, we are working on prototyping the opening level of the game  which acts as a kind of tutorial for the game too. Everything is rough and almost surely going to change or evolve as we iterate. 

So far, I am more focused on implementing the functionalities, writing  and developing the story, while Dom has been busy making levels. There is a lot of fun, and more to be had in the constant back and forth between in-engine prototyping and experimentation, and drafting up ideas on paper and in meetings. 

While some practices may seem overkill in a two-man project, we are keen on maintaining professional habits and best practices. We're using Github for version control with LFS enabled to give us some more wiggle room, Our coms are all done in Slack and we use Miro for sharing and documenting ideas and we use good old sheets for keeping our design document up to date

I post the latest prototype here every week. Sometimes, a whole week's work has gone into it, and sometime much less, where there were other things I was working on.