Dang

 So it turns out, learning unreal engine is harder than I expected it to be. I mean, I wasn't expecting a lot after roughly a week of messing with it on and off, but like, I thought I'd have more than a big ugly rectangle with some hills.

I was wanting to start making stuff that would be able to be built upon as I learn, but it feels like I don't even know enough to do that much. I feel like what I'm going to have to start with is like, nature scenes, and manually building any structures that I would want in it. But what really highlighted the fact that I have no idea what I'm doing is when I tried changing a skeletal mesh and then the animations just no longer worked at all for the default system. Not even when I changed it back.

I was estimating like 5 years from start to finish for this project, maybe having something playable by year 3, maybe 2.5 at the earliest. And I still do think that's not a crazy goal. But I need to invest more time in the project than I've been able to. Not sure yet what I'll have to cut out, but the last thing I want to do is burn out and give up.