Hansel and Gretel — Individual Game
For my individual game, I made a maze game.
First, I made a document to just do a brain dump of what I wanted the game to do. Over the course of making the game, I crossed out things I didn’t want to include anymore, and I unbolded all the things I finished. I marked in red things I changed to better fit the game. It was a nice working document for me to stay on track.
Second, I made a quick basic layout of the maze. This included the walls’ locations to delineate the path, the walls’ heights so the user couldn’t see the tops, and breadcrumb placement for the first level.
Third, I started implementing actual game mechanics and features. I followed Christian’s Taco Treasure Tutorials. They helped me understand the game mechanics and how everything connected together. I really liked how he taught the setup of game frameworks with the player state and player controller blueprints.
The counting of the breadcrumbs wasn’t that hard to implement. I followed how Christian did it for his tacos. I added the spinning effect so the user would know to interact with it.
The health system gave me bit of trouble. At first, I thought I had to give each wall a collision box. That would require going to each of the 17 walls, adding the box, sizing it appropriately, then adding the collision preset. Instead, with Christian’s advice, I added one actor that directly affected the player, so any overlap with the specified objects would cause health damage. This was easier and faster. The decrement also gave me some issues. It was decrementing way too fast. It was also decrementing while holding down the W (forward) key. I had originally wanted it to decrement just on the first instance of overlap. But after considering what it was currently doing, I decided to just decrement in smaller steps (decreasing by 1 instead of 100). This makes it so the user can’t “slide” against the walls in the game without damage to health. My original idea was the user could touch the walls because they were hazardous to your health (magic forest = deadly trees), so this actually worked better for that goal than just decrementing on the initial instance.
The timer was pretty easy to implement. There was a small hiccup when I casted to the player state instead of my blueprint player state. Once that was figured out, the timer was good to go.
For the player character, there was a small issue with being able to see through the walls of the maze when there was overlap. After a quick discussion with Christian, all I had to do was pull back the camera view so it didn’t overlap with the walls.
Fourth, I added materials and textures. I gave the walls a mossy material. I wanted them to almost be like the maze walls from the Triwizard Tournament in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The ground is cobblestone. I wanted it to be dirt, but every time I tried to manipulate a material or texture to get a dirt look, the lighting made it look like a solid (wood) surface, so I stuck with cobblestones.
Fifth, I added sound. I added a world sound, a sound for picking up the breadcrumbs, and a sound for bumping into the walls. One issue that sometimes pops up is when a user bumps into a wall for two long, the background music either cuts out completely or starts over.
Finally, I made the end game HUDs. Each scenario has it’s own game ending screen. Grabbing all the breadcrumbs results in a congratulations message while losing (via health or time) will result in a game over message accompanied with a reason why. These weren’t too difficult to implement. One issue that needs solving is when the user clicks restart, the game goes back to the initial spawn location, the breadcrumbs are all there, but the user can no longer move.
Here is my game design document that details the actual mechanics and building of the game. It also has more detailed photos and demo videos.
Here are a few pictures of the game:
