Category: UnrealBasics

Setting A Reminder in My Phone

October 14th, 2023

I’ve had a crazy past couple months, learning so much both in class and on my own! I’ll add a few examples in for what I’ve been working on, but so far I’ve created TicTacToe, created a number puzzle game from some old Mensa books, and started working on some ideas that involve a personal game idea I’ve had for a while! Also, I’m going to set a reminder on my phone to post weekly at minimum from now on, to keep you all updated on my progress!

Firstly, let’s discuss TicTacToe. These are some long gifs, so I had to lower their framerate, but as you can see I have created a fully scalable TicTacToe board, which can go up to 47×47 on my current screen size, with an added bonus of allowing for more than 2 players! I set it to be a max of board size, meaning you can have up to 7 players on a 7×7 board, and so on, which the method of checking for a win being scalable with the player count as well.

Secondly, we have a game called Spokes, or WagonWheel to some. My dad found it in a Mensa book a long while back and has been begging me to make it for him since High School. I was finally able to create it, with some added bonuses including a line size slide bar to make the lines slightly larger, a Number Hints button which shows the total needed active lines, current active lines, and the difference between the two, plus the color hints button that shows when a specific circle has too man, not enough, or the correct amount of active lines next to it! Needless to say my dad was very excited! On top of all that, you can download it to play the game for yourself at:

https://maverickspore.itch.io/spokes

Finally, we land on what I can only label as a surprise. This game is an idea I have had for a decent while, but for now I am starting off small by learning to create specific functions required for the much larger project this game will become. Currently I have learned one method of detecting when the player is near an instance of the NPC. This then shows the text above their head, which disappears when you move away. With that, I was able to have a speak mechanic to move to their next piece of text, thus “speaking” to the player. For a bonus, I learned how to make this in a way that each NPC can have completely unique text, while using the same base code and not having to start from scratch for every NPC I need to build within this game!

Overall, I’ve been extremely busy learning and building these past few months, and with everything I’ve created I’m only in Programming 1 so far, relearning the basics of programming. Needless to say, I’m excited to come back to these extracurricular projects in upcoming classes as I learn better, more efficient ways to build some of the functions I’ve built in these projects!
Updates – I’m Still Here

August 14th, 2023

Hey everyone! You may be wondering where I’ve been, and I have some amazing news for you! After having that fun re-learning Unity Basics and after about a day of looking at Unreal Engine I was extremely excited about my new journey and got carried away diving head-first into my classes! I am going to try my hardest to post more often than I have in the last month and a half, but I can’t promise a daily post the way I did when I started this blog. Though I’m still in the Gen Ed portion of my studies, I am already playing with Unreal Engine 5 in my free time and learning a lot!

One thing I’ve learned is the basic movements in a third person game, but also how to teleport between different layers of a side scrolling level. On top of that, I made sure to stop the character from teleporting against or into walls to keep the character on the correct platform!

On top of that, I also learned how to make the basics to a card game, even allowing for the cards to be moved around in the hand for your own organizing purposes. Getting the moved card’s opacity back to fully opaque after being moved proved to be harder than expected, but I figured it out!
Day One of Learning Unreal

June 16th, 2023

Learning Unreal Engine so far is completely different from learning Unity. In Unity, I focused on learning C#, and learning how to create items through code. So far in Unreal Engine I’ve mostly focused on learning the engine, itself, and how to create and manipulate assets and objects within the engine, instead of focusing on C++. That being said, it has been very cool to learn so far, and I’m sure I’m going to enjoy learning it further!

Something this tutorial focuses heavily on is materials. Specifically, how to make simple customizable materials with the standard, included, assets Unreal has to offer, with the help of some assets created by the presenter. We first started by creating the base color, metallic values, roughness, and what is called the “normal” in the material settings. Once it was at a good point, we changed many of those same pieces into parameters, allowing it to be edited live in an instanced version of the material.

As you can see in the image above, this is the instanced version of the original material. Anything on the right with a checkbox allows us to change those variables in real time to see in the scene. We could even change the base texture from pavement to grass, or water, if we needed to. Overall Unreal Engine feels like a completely different beast, but I have yet to focus on the actual code and have only been focused on the engine itself.
A Slight Change of Pace

June 13th, 2023

You may have noticed my lack of posting over the last few days, and there is a reason for that! I was making a lot of progress in learning on my own, but I have decided to take some classes, and work on getting a degree in the field. That being said, this school focuses on Unreal, not Unity, meaning I am going to shift my focus from learning Unity to learning Unreal, instead. I will continue to post here on my new blog as I go through this transition and begin to create in Unreal! Make sure to come back tomorrow to see what I have learned during Day One of Learning Unreal!