Hello there fellow devs!
I am currently undergoing the RPG course for growing my programming skills in Unity. I have a decent base on C# from the university, but nothing can be compared to a real practical programming, am I right?
I am a remorseless RPG fun, though I have to admit that fantasy genre, which is actually a majority of good RPG games, has never been my cup of tea. My passion has always been a post-apocalyptia - Mad Max series, A boy and his dog, I am Legend (both novel and film), Metro (both novel and games) and - for me - the most iconic video game of this genre - Fallout.
It has been many years since I discovered this (now legendary) RPG experience, though I have never really “swallowed” the changes Bethesda did to the franchise since the original creators from Interplay went to bankruptcy. I know we will never see a new Fallout from the original creators, and that really hurts, but there is nothing to be done about it.
Me and my good friend Samuel - we had a lots of discussions and ideas about what might a new, classic styled Fallout game look like. It became a “shrapnel in a head” for both of us. When we spoked to other Fallout fans about our ideas, they were like “oh boy that sounds good, if only this could have been done”. It turned out that Samuel has a pretty decent mind for designing and writing (and now he actually works in a game industry). And me? Well, in those times, I wasn’t much a of use for game development, really 
But that changed when I discovered Unity engine. I started to learn the basics, all on my own, just for being able to create scenes and enviroments. And then I started to design my own leves, all Fallout themed. I showed it to some folks and they liked it, so I sticked with Unity and continued to learn. I am currently studying programming at university so I have some “mediocore” knowledge-base on how to code, and so I programmed some basic things for my Unity project, like camera and so on. In that time, I wasnt really sure about what I am creating, though I was certain that it should be similar to Wasteland 2 (created by Brian Fargo, producer of the original Fallout) as for some game aspects, mechanics and some gameplay elements.
And then, after months of no decent ideas, I dived deeper into design documents of the cancelled Fallout game from 2003, which was meant to be a Fallout 3 before Black Isle Studio was closed and Interplay bankrupted in years following. I knew this “Project Van Buren” for a long time, it was leaked by Josh Sawyer, its lead designer, in 2007 on fan forum, though it has never actracted me so much. When I started to read it deeper, visualising the concepts and designs in my head, I discovered all those opportunities and aspects it was offering, all things I liked about older Fallout games - gray-morality, ethic challenges, remarkable narrative and writing, kind of Mad Max tone/theme, dark humor and mainly - proper RPG elements. Right then a there I was certain that this needs to be done. Of course, such a huge project is far more than one or two “devs” can do. But you know what? I don’t care. I do what I can, building it piece-by-piece, learning many thing in the process, and even if it would take 10 years or more (well, I am a steel foundry worker, believe it or not, so I cant work on it fulltime), I will work on it - just for a passion. Because letting all this potencial die in a time would be a crime. Now I know, there were many self-proclaimed “heroes” like me in a past, and they abandoned their projects after a few month if they were lucky. Well, my work on designing has started about half of year ago, and even I cant believe it myself, my enthusiasm hasnt fade out, it actually has grew - the reason will be explained down below
So, to cut this long and boring story, let’s see some screens, shall we?
These screens are in-engine views of my first (and still far from finished) map - Burham Springs. I use it as a test map for a RPG course. Most of the assets comes from bought packeges, both Unity and Unreal ones (which one was cheaper that is). Some particular assets (road and ruined houses) have been ripped from Fallout New Vegas and handly converted and retextured. The rest is work of my fiction. I read the document on Burham Springs, created my vision and started to work. It’s maybe a half done, the idustrial part only has some placeholder meshes there, though no details yet. I halted the work on level for I have bought the RPG course on Udemy and now I am coding some basic mechanics along with the course.
Now to the reason for my enthusiasm I mentioned above 
One day I felt like I need to share my creation with someone… how to put it… “competent to judge”. So I posted two screens on Twitter and tagged Josh Saywer, former lead designer of this project. Since he liked and retweeted it, I assume (really, just assuming, don’t know for sure ) he liked it. Now I feel kind of responsibility for this - when I was this privileged, how can I just abandon it?
Here is a quick video of whole map. As I said, half of it is nearly empty, only with placeholders. My priority now is to follow the course, so it will take some time before I can start working on it again.
Don’t mind that naked girl, she serves as an enemy for me to test (she is good at shooting small tennis balls at me a doing some damage ). Console display is my latest work outside of the course, even a health bar is working, though it is not visible in video as I dont want you to see that girl chasing me and throwing tennis balls at me
So… what do you say? Please, I need to read some more opinions, and mainly critics, critics and more critics. Thank you for your time, and wish you all the best.
I want to specially thank @ben and @Rick_Davidson for this amazing course, none on this would be possible without you guys. In last few week I have learned more of coding that during my recent 2 years in university. Thank you so much.
