I pulled the trigger on the major assets I wanted to purchase. Big Office as the main asset, a TV news studio with a green screen, and a jail to experiment with.
I also downloaded the Black Hole asset, which seems to work well enough to pass on to the team to get working. Having it work as a destructible mesh could be interesting.
Main issue was just the time it took to break down Big Office. Its animations used the older Matinee animation system, so I transitioned them to Sequencer, and learned how that worked. I also realized some meshes were combined, so I researched how to export meshes out of Unreal. I think I got a little side tracked dealing with materials, and it seems it's not necessary to deal with the materials, and just can modify the FBX. I'm hoping an Unreal plugin, Mesh Tool, might let me do this in engine, but I'm waiting to hear back from the author of the plugin first.
Nothing wrong with these steps, but as the project reach the end of roughly its first third of the semester, there is a big need for more progress soon on my end, to tie things together. Story related elements were considered to be implemented in the second phase, but at this point I am seeing the timeline as a two month period of getting the world up and running. In order for me to include important pieces such as video, however, I need to realistically have at least my work done before that marker.