It’s Just Unreal Pt.2

The past couple of weeks have been learning heavy and exciting at the same time. From playing with blueprints to creating my first ever game, here is the break down of what I learnt in Unreal Engine 5.

Splining along

Blueprints

The bootcamp continued with further understanding blueprints. Using blueprints was way more easier than actually typing out code perfectly. Understanding the logic of how it works was really important than actually just copying it. Most of the blueprints I had used were of the actor class were I played around with static meshes, text renders, lighting, colliders and whatever else I could modify.

Playing around with blueprints

Creating splines introduced us to construction scripts. So far in blueprints, I mainly used the event graphs, where the code was executed when the game begins. Construction scripts, on the other hand, works even before the game is executed. It works in the editor mode. Here is a better explanation.

Configurator

Level variant managers entered into the picture, along with the widget blueprints when learning to create a configurator. Mine has a long way to go, and I’m still trying to get better understanding of the lighting.

Here is where I am at:

I tried building a shoe configurator

The inspiration:

While learning all of this, I was also playing around with tutorials that piqued my interest on Youtube.

My First Game

My first video game on Unreal is about forest fires, and how you, the firefighter, have to extinguish it. In order to extinguish the fire, you needed to collect the water droplets. Save the forest, or die trying.

Quick game play of the forest fire game

Here is the quick run through of how I created it:

1. Create blueprints for collecting items.
2. Go to the third person character blueprint. Create variables like health and pickup count. Connect the pick up count variable with the previous blueprint. Test it using the print string node.
3. Now create areas of damage using another actor class blueprint. Connect it with the third person blueprint and test again to see if it works.
4. Create a widget blueprint, to show the health(as a progress bar) and pick up count(as text) on screen while playing.
5. Check if basic game works. Then proceed to environment creation. Check again to see if your layout and game works when in play mode. This is important because something that looks good when on the editor, doesn't mean it will work when in game mode.
6. Create more levels and widget blueprints - one for starting the game, one for pausing, one for ending the game.
7. Export the game🤞for others to play. (I am still struggling with this. Version 1 exported, but the final one just refuses)

Bonus: KEEP YOUR FILES AND FOLDERS ORGANIZED. Remove the unnecessary meshes and textures, and convert whatever you can into nanites. Export to another file to reduce size.

How I see the game development process

My first VR game

Either I am not looking in the right places, or there is a surprising lack of VR UE5 tutorials — especially game related. I spent most of my time struggling to get the Meta Quest 2 headset set up (and the other half resting my eyes from the strain of using the headset for too long). Finally I created what I though was a bowling game. But due to popular demand by my test users (my classmates), I decided to also make it a stress busting game of flinging low- poly snowmen. (Stress buster game to come soon).

In addition to all of this we also messed around a bit with the Unreal Editor for Fortnite. In a lot of ways, it was similar to UE5. I enjoyed how much we could build environments in game play.

So I forgot all about the Unreal Editor for Fornite and ended up playing Lego Fortnite.

That kind of back-fired.

These past few weeks we spent on UE5 just made me realize how much more there was to create a game. The Riots series ‘So You Wanna Make Games??’, did open my eyes to the game making process. But, by actually trying to create a game myself, it helped me understand just how much effort(and computer power) goes into creating one.