Making Cutscene is Time Consuming

Author: Riley Darling 

Posted on 5/24/2024

Many times during game development, we will plan the general amount of time we will take on a problem and sometimes think about the maximum time we are willing to spend on it before giving up and working on something else. Another common thing I have found with Game Developers is this "maximum time" is something we like to ignore a lot and need to remind ourselves that we've spent too much time on it.

This week I worked on the opening cutscene for our game and found out just how time consuming the Unreal Engine sequencer is, you can do a lot of work and make little to no progress because of how terrible the key frame system is, many times you will try to copy some key frames and end up pasting them over other keyframes that you didn't want to affect. This and the terrible options with tweening, most importantly not being able to turn off the tween between two keyframes, led to many frustrations during the cutscene. In addition to this, the finished product ended up being less than a minute making the work I put in feel completely worthless.

I am a firm believer in failing, it helps you learn the best way to complete a task by learning the worst way to complete a task. In the future, now that I have more experience with the sequencer, I feel a lot more confident in working with it as well as increasing the amount of time the cutscene lasts. Tweening is still causing issues with the camera, but I'm slowly figuring out how to fix this issue as well. While I don't feel confident in the slightest using the sequencer I am certainly learning it slowly by slowly, it's never fun to learn a skill that is initially confusing but once you figure it out it feels so much better than understanding a skill as soon as you pick it up!