DevLog #1

So today a Created my first Game ever for the Mini Jam 85: Gold Game Jam.

 So everything started on the Friday night when i started to work on the Project. I New the category had to be gold and the Limitation was a Timer of 60 seconds. So the most simple idea i could think of was a Puzzle game that had to be completed in 60 seconds. 

I had just finished a Blueprints/Unreal engine Course on Udemy. So i decided to use those skills i earned to build something. 

First i said, Lets do this straight in Unreal Engine 5. Why not right? its simple enought that it should work. This was a huge mistake. I'll explain a bit later.  Also i use a Pack called SuperGrid, Which basically brings meshes and materials of different shapes that you can use to build levels, Just makes level prototyping a lot easier. 

Lets start with the first Puzzle:

Pretty Easy, just placing walls and making a Maze. 

Second Puzzle: 

This was my favorite, the idea was to create a "Indiana Jones" style passage that could only be traversed using the right order of letters. This Was basically a Blueprint with a Mesh, A box Collider, and a trigger that when pressed i would check to see if the Item is Fragile then it would add physics to the object, if not it would stay still and give a rewarding sound. This is when Unreal Engine 5 started to have problems, when i created more that 10 of those tiles, The framerate of the game would drop from 120 to 20fps, i didnt know why, i thought it was me and wasnt doing it right. after hours of trying to figure it out i did a quick test in UE4 and guess what?, Yes it worked perfectly. So it means it really is Early Acces After all. xD. So then i started to recreate the entire 2 puzzles again from scratch in UE4. 

Third Puzzle: 
Here i learnt about InterpToMovement, Its basically a class that allows you to set the movement of an object without having to do it manually yourself.

Fourth Puzzle: 

Same as the first puzzle just placing meshed very thin and tracing the way. 

Last Puzzle: 

Here i created a Blueprint that would rotate the cube in the direction i wanted and speed. 

After completing all the puzzles, I started to add materials to each one of the object to give it a difference in color. Then i started to work on the Timer and general logic of the application. Placing triggers on each puzzle and creating a Checkpoint For each one of them. 

The last part, and most fun was recording the voices and placing them in the different parts of the game. For this i used Adobe Audition. and saved the Audios as Wav Files which is what unreal Engine Uses. 

The winning part of the Game i quickly created a Blender model of a Gold Ingot and then inside Unreal engine i Have it the Metal Gold Material that comes as part of the starter pack.

In general this was a great experience, of course this post is over simplified but it shows a little what i did during the Game Jam. In general it took me about 24 hours really to build everthing with all the problems i had along the way.  I spent Friday night 6 Hours, Satudarday 6 Hours, about 12 hours on sunday. 

Any questions please feel free to ask in the comments section.  I wanted to upload the blueprints to this post but it keeps saying there is an error on the Server. Ill see if i can upload them later.