Valentines Game – First Prototype

March 3, 2026

Valentines Game

Description:
About a month ago for Valentine’s Day, I created a very quick rough game prototype for my wife as a gift.

Overview:
I wanted to create a very small, quick game as a gift for my wife for Valentine’s day. The main goals of this project were: make it nice and personalized, create something playable very quickly (since I had about 4 days to make it at the time), and learn to create digital art in some form.

The very small timeline was a good test to see how quickly I could put a playalbe demo of something together. Making it personalized and learning to create digital art went hand in hand, and I decided to get back into using Aseprite as a seemingly quick way to get into making digital art in some form since it is pretty basic and you can emulate existing sprite art relatively easily.

Aesprite:
As mentioned, my art software of choice for this project was Aesprite. It was actually very quick to pick this up if you do not need any fancy art tools besides “click to make pixels and sprites”. I could immediately generate single frame sprites and export those to easy to use 16 px x 16 px PNGs to use in the game. And I knew for the player I wanted the sprite to change as it constructed its own sweater, so that provided a quick pathway to starting to learn how to setup a basic sprite sheet in Aesprite by just adding a few frames to a given Aesprite file (which will be helpful for getting into animation later).

Screenshot of Current State of Game:

Screenshot of Valentine's Game Prototype

Unreal Ultimate 2D Topdown Udemy Course – Overview

March 3, 2026

The Ultimate 2D Top Down Unreal Engine Course

Title:

The Ultimate 2D Top Down Unreal Engine Course


By:
Cobra Code

Udemy Course Link

Description:
Comprehensive course of learning the basics of Unreal and creating 2D projects with it, with a focus on Paper2D.

Overview:
I wanted to get some general Unreal experience, and was recommended this interesting tutorial, so figured this would be a good place to start. While Unreal is primarily an engine for 3D projects, this course specifically targets how to create a 2D project using it. I thought this would actually be a good starting point because it still covers all the general Unreal basics, while exploring something a bit off the conventional path seemed like it’d also help teach me some of the more niche aspects of the engine thereby making it wider than a lot of other intro courses.

This course also has you create several entirely separate 2D projects, covering a lot of types of games I am interested in. The first is a fully topdown adventure demo in the lines of a Pokemon type game. The second is another fully topdown game that resembles older 2D Zelda titles, with combat. The third is what they call a 2D/3D hybrid, resembling an Octopath Traveler, which combines 2D and 3D assets, and is something I could see Unreal being particularly good to use to build.