The Hourglass

The Story

After everything I'd learned on Unity, moving to Unreal Engine was a dizzying technological leap. The engine's potential is immense, packed with possibilities that fascinated me. I wanted to explore a style that was truly my own: cold and pastel.

The idea was almost an accident. I'd started modelling very simple things, rudimentary trees, a terrain. Then I began playing with particles, rain, snow. And there, a strange feeling came over me: slowness, the passing of time. That's where the hourglass appeared. A peaceful scene, a character lost in time, that nocturnal atmosphere I'd been carrying since Lost Sanctuary.

I don't really know why this concept came to me. It was intuitive, almost obvious.

Under the Hood

I built The Hourglass on Unreal Engine, giving my imagination free rein. And this is where everything truly began: it's the first scene where every asset is modelled by hand, and the first where I programmed every line of code myself. Fully vanilla, from start to finish.

The style was already there: low poly, pastel. These are my very first assets. They have a thousand flaws, and they're probably no longer usable today without being remodelled. But they're the first, and that's what matters.

Unreal Engine · Hand-modelled assets · Systems coded from scratch

The Wall

For once, there was no big wall. It's the first project I did not conceive as a large game to finish: it was owned as a demo scene, a prototype, an experiment.

The real challenge, a gentler one, was taming a whole new technology. Getting acclimatized to this Unreal ecosystem I didn't know. Coding a weather system for the first time, particles, lighting effects. Not a wall that blocks you, but a mountain you climb with pleasure.

What I'm Proud Of

The result was genuinely satisfying. It's a far cry from what I design today, of course, but for a very first step on Unreal, with very little 3D experience, never having modelled assets or coded a weather system... it was a real achievement.

It's the project where I did everything for the first time. The modelling, the particles, the light. A formative experience like few others.

What I Learned

The Hourglass taught me that Unreal Engine is packed with potential, that there's an enormous amount you can do with it. It became, and has remained to this day, my favourite development engine.

But the real lesson, I only understood later: this scene initiated the style I still use today. The cold, the pastel, the low poly, the contemplative mood. It all started here.

Today

It's a completed project, in the sense that it was a finished demo scene, a prototype. There was no direct sequel, that was never the goal.

But its legacy is immense: The Hourglass is the scene that gave birth to my visual identity. Every pastel world I create today descends, in a way, from that first hourglass lost in time.