●Blog Launched
This blog shares updates, behind-the-scenes insights, and future plans for Hotch Potch House.
I plan to update it monthly, so feel free to drop by when you have time.
Also find me on Mastodon, Bluesky, and X for more bite-sized updates.
So, let’s dive into the June 2025 progress!
●UI Overhaul
I revamped the UI. The original felt off, and I just needed to fix it fast—mission accomplished.
Here’s a quick comparison of the changes:
(I’m only showing mockups of new versions, but the actual implementation matches closely.)
UI overhaul had always been a top priority, but since UI design isn’t my area of expertise, I kept putting it off. This time, I finally made up my mind to tackle it—and as expected, it was a lot of work.
It was tough enough that I decided to make it the very first topic on my blog.
But if something is hard, that just means there’s room to grow. I learned a lot through the process.
So here’s how I approached it: I started by creating mockups in Affinity Designer to finalize the overall design.
The biggest decision was whether to go with a dark theme or a light theme. Initially, I was planning to use a light theme, but in the end, I chose dark to protect players’ eyes.
(I also changed the website to a dark theme. I’m planning to add a toggle feature in the future—stay tuned.)
Side note: Affinity Designer is great. It’s fast, responsive, and a one-time purchase. I’ve fully switched over from Illustrator.
Once the mockups were done, I created the actual UI elements in UE5 and laid them out. That part went smoothly.
What was tough was building the logic—especially for the ability menu.
…I tried explaining it in writing, but it’s hard to put into words. So let’s just say it was tough.
Aside from the technical parts, I think my obsession with writing clean code made things harder than they needed to be.
If the code isn’t tidy, I feel uneasy. Keeping things organized helps with debugging and adjustments, but maybe I overdid it a bit.
●Scheduling
I’d been meaning to revisit my schedule for the September Epic Mega Grants submission, but I kept putting it off…
But I finally sat down and did it.
I started by listing my major goals in Obsidian, organized by category with checkboxes.
Then I broke them down into weekly and daily tasks and transferred everything to my custom planner.
Having everything laid out like this really helps: it shows me exactly what to do, keeps me motivated, and takes a load off my mind.
By the way, I built this planner myself a while ago, and I’ve stuck with it ever since.
Custom-made really is the best.
●New Ability
I added a new “Steam” ability. Adding another skill really livens things up—it makes the game feel much more like a real game.
I have plenty more abilities planned, but I’ll probably hold off on sharing them here to avoid spoilers. It’s a common dilemma in game development: you want to show off your progress, but revealing too much can ruin the fun. It reminds me of something a producer at Studio Ghibli once said about Avatar Way of Water: “If you watch all the trailers, you get the whole story, so there’s no reason to see the movie.” or something like that. Still, Avatar Way of Water turned out to be a huge success, so maybe spoilers don’t matter as much as we think.
What do I do🤔
●By the way…
Epic has released Unreal Engine 5.6! There are tons of great updates—MetaHuman, Movie Render Graph, and more—but personally, what excites me most is the major improvement to State Tree.
Finally, I feel like I can graduate from Behavior Trees. BTs have been around forever, and while they’re stable and usable, they’ve always felt cluttered to me.
In contrast, State Trees are so much cleaner. Don’t you think?
Once version 5.6.1 is out, I’m planning to migrate all my BT logic over to State Tree. I’m aiming to finish the migration in early August, so I’ll post an update here once that’s done.
●Rig and Animation Recreation
I rebuilt Tabi’s rig. It was a lot of work.
But the result is a more flexible and elegant rig than before. I also remade the animations to match the new rig, and while I was at it, I changed the framerate from 24fps to 60fps. Now it moves much more smoothly.
No demo video this time (Filming is kind of a hassle. Sorry), but it’ll be featured properly in the next gameplay video.
●Beautiful Memories
I’d been meaning to start working on the Memories system, but it was one of those things I kept putting off, mostly because the sheer number of items felt overwhelming.
I finally committed to making one per week, and now I’ve got six done.
The final goal is around 40, so at this pace, it’ll take about nine more months to complete. Still a long road ahead.
Also, while not part of this month’s work, I rebuilt the logic behind it. During the previous demo, I was using Flipbook—basically just a flat comic-strip-style system. This time, I switched to using SceneCaptureComponent2D instead. That fixed the blurry visuals that would sometimes appear during loading. Very happy with that change.
●What’s Next?
The next major milestone is applying for the Epic Mega Grants.
This will be my third attempt.
The deadline is September 22, so my goal is to finish core features by August and spend September polishing.
Big tasks ahead: quest implementation, AI migration to State Tree, redoing water effects, and more.
That’s it for this update.
I expected to finish earlier, but here I am at the end of July.
Next update is planned by August 15.
Thank you for reading and see you next time!