State of the game - life is a mess and seeking help

The switch to unreal went quite fast and if you followed the stream you know the changes I made to the original concept. Lately I had a few problems with motivation and as a result I did not work on the game as much as I wanted to and I am way behind schedule (by about two month so far).

All that does not mean that I will abandon the game in any way. It simply means that the schedule I set for the streams and the work might not be the same as stated on twitch. The starting time of 10 in the morning is not really working for me most of the time. I was thinking of changing to a 12 to 20 schedule on Tuesdays and Thursday. The rest of the week will hopefully to schedule but I cannot assure that.

As to the game itself, all the old mechanics are in and the first quest is in as well (get beer). There is also the overarching main quest in but only the first two steps are achievable, the rest is not implemented yet. There are a few uncertainties in my original design that I need to figured out. Another thing that is not clear as of now is the visual style of the game on release. Originally I was thinking about a realistic style with me being able to design characters according to some parameters but I cannot easily use the same system in Unreal as I would in Unity.
Now, I was thinking of going the cartoony realism route, like WoW or Darksiders. The problem is that I cannot paint textures myself and I cannot create all environment models myself or it would just take way longer than a trained artist would need for the same work.
Apart from the art side of the game, I still need a lot of story and dialogue content which means a lot of writing and other aspects of the game need to be designed as well.
In a game about beer, there is no beer or any brewing yet, not sure how far I want to go. There is not enough to do in the game so far and I need to change that...

As to my life, it really is a mess, I do not know what is wrong with me but I will get some help soon and hope that I will be able to continue working on the game and get my life in check at the same time. So I hope you will understand this will be my focus first and foremost.

Possible Engine Change

Due to issues with different aspects of my game in Unity, I decided to switch over to Unreal as I got a lot more documentation and tutorials for that engine as for Unity.

One of the issues are for instance the shader I was using for my terrain that made the textures look better and let me have "holes" in the terrain for my caves. The theory is really nice but over long period of time I did not manage to configure the shader to my satisfaction.
In Unreal, I can do the same thing just out of the box and with simple configurations. On one afternoon I was able to import my terrain into Unreal and set it up that it looked similar to the result in vanilla Unity, I also found a tutorial to get the full functionality of the Unity shader in Unreal.
Unfortunately, I also found a bug in Unreal that removes the textures in the piece of terrain on which the terrain hole is located.

Next steps are to import all the environment assets I used in Unity into Unreal and add them to level. After that I will add the mechanics in blueprints to the Unreal project.

Meanwhile, my brother is working on basic character meshes and a pipeline to provide me with different base meshes for each race that I can then use for my character creation both ingame and for npcs.

All this means, that there will be a further delay in my schedule (which is already about a month behind) but hopefully result in a better base game as well. I will work on key features during the next week and if I run into mayor issues along the way, I only "wasted" a week and will go back to Unity where I have to change the scope a bit and then work on more content. In the event that Unreal helps me catch up lost time and speed up development, I will stick with it and continue working on having a prototype ready for testing a week later.

Updates after a pause that was far too long

It has been too long without any update, my life is still kinda the same. I am working on my projects and some of them proceed others fall victim to unfortunate time management. 

As for projects, my game projects have changed a bit. 

I will continue working on Zombie Sleepover at later date, a friend of mine (another game designer from the Games Academy who helped me with a three month internship at a local game company) is going over the design and is making a proper design document for a fun first person shooter.

Dork Tales is on hiatus at the moment and I might get back to it as soon as I get someone to help me out with assets like 3D models and audio files (music and voice overs). The ideas I have for the game I cannot realise as of now, meaning without money to pay for the help I need.

I started a new project to work with Unreal Engine 4. It is an idea I was toying with for some time and it is based upon Phaeton, the scifi world some friends and I have been working on for some time. It is based on Blueprints at the moment but I will change that for later iterations and convert them to C++, at least the most crucial systems.

Oh, I mentioned an internship earlier. I was having no luck getting a job in the industry with traditional methods but got an offer for an internship after posting in an private user group. I tweaked my CV and over those connections I got an internship at a local game company working with Unity. The project is off yet unannounced, so I am not able to talk about it. Working in a real company sure was a learning experience that changed my expectations a bit. I learned the importance of good structure in code and project alike and that communication should never be neglected.

On other fronts, I picked up writing again and might even start up another blog or something similar just for that. That will include the translations of almost all my stories into English as they are almost all in German. I also came up with a new idea for a story that I might publish along with the other older stuff.

I haven't really played any games for some time now apart from Creativerse but as much as I like the game, it is just a time waster, something you can play on the side while watching tv series or movies. Speaking of games, Fallout Shelter released on Android and I wasted some time and money in it so far. I would not really call it a game in the classic sense, it is just a clicker that tries to push some buttons like caring for your dwellers and leveling up as many of them to get better gear from the wasteland to have better chances of survival. It is a recurring cycle repeating over and over again without any real involvement and chance of influencing it.