BP: Blueprinting Blues

Blueprinting can be a difficult process for someone unfamiliar. But in order to create the game we wanted, we rose to the challenge.

As we developed and experimented with game mechanics, our artists learnt on the job, with assistance from our tutors and online tutorials to get to know the Blueprinting language.

One of the first things we learnt was how to move boxes around and the functionality of Trigger Boxes. These special type of boxes allow event to be triggered when walking through them.

From here, the Blueprints were adapted to suit the games needs, whilst making use of some already existing Blueprints from the Unreal Marketplace and adapting them.

A tool we found ourselves using often was the Sequencer. This allows various scene objects to be animated within the world through a set of triggers and events. We’ve touched before

To advance our skills in Blueprinting whilst improving the game, we mixed using variables within Blueprint Actors and the Level Blueprint to make things happen.

The example below is taken from the Outskirts Level Blueprint, where the player must go to the barn’s basement to switch on a generator, in order to open a door. The catch here is that if the player tries to flick a lever before the power is on, a red light flashes to indicate something is wrong.

A Boolean variable was used here to only play the next set of nodes if it is true, which the Boolean understands with the values 0 and 1.