Going to school for Game Development doesn’t always mean working in Unreal Engine. In fact, all of what I’ve been doing in this blog so far was extracurricular development to become more familiar with Unreal Engine before classes start using it. Mostly, I’ve gone through core classes including Calculus and Discrete Math. These past two months, however, were Programming 1 and 2 in C++ and I’ve learned lots, even given my background knowledge in programming in general. These skills come in handy, but in ways you wouldn’t expect a lot of times.

My cousin asked me for some quick sample code for a marketing assignment he had, and my first thought was simply, “What could I build quickly that is fully functional?” I remembered making a shop in an optional challenge in Programming 1 and decided to rebuild a quick easy version of that shop for him with a fun name because it sounded silly! Now, I’ll be the first to admit there are issues in this code. However, I made it in like 15 minutes, and I had to keep it all in a single class with a couple methods so I could easily take a screenshot of the entirety of the code, as opposed to multiple screenshots.

That reminded me of the text-based game most people know, called Zork, which was also re-created within Call of Duty: Black Ops. I figured it would be good for coding practice, so I started typing. First getting the player name and introducing them to the world, and then giving them a moment before throwing them in, by using the enter key to officially start playing.

I’ve created two basic areas so far with the grass field being the first area you enter. From there, you can choose what direction to venture toward to create your own story! However the forest entry and the front door of the house are the only areas I have created thus far, so for now it is very limited.

Something we learned in Programming 1 was how to create a time-based display, similar to Pokémon, which I absolutely love using, so I added that to give the player a feeling of fluidity in the text, as opposed to all the text popping up on the screen immediately, with no real transitions.