Semi Greybox Level Design and A Salutation
Some dev friends of mine gave me a great suggestion to greybox/block-out my town. For those of you that are unfamiliar with greyboxing, like I was before my friends explained it to me, it's where you create the layout of a level with blocks (usually grey ones) to not only see how the level looks but also how it feels when having your character run around it. Since I had some preset buildings in my assets, I figured it would be a little better than just using blocks.
After that, I moved on to learning how to interact with NPCs in order to have them provide a dialogue box as well as trigger a specific animation. Back when I was using RPG Maker, the dialogue and emoticon commands were as easy as clicking on a button. But with Unreal, since there are so many ways to approach dialogue, I had to learn which one would best fit my game. I had no idea how to animate an NPC based on your interaction with them. But once again, thanks to some dev friends, I was able to figure it out. Here's a little sample of what I learned.