𝔗𝔥𝔞𝔫𝔨𝔰 𝔣𝔬𝔯 𝔠𝔥𝔢𝔠𝔨𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔬𝔲𝔱 𝔴𝔦𝔷𝔞𝔯𝔡𝔰 & 𝔴𝔞𝔯𝔯𝔦𝔬𝔯𝔰!

My name is Caitlyn Sherman and I primarily handled the UI for the shop and HUD. I acted both as programmer and designer, and wrote the dialogue lines for the merchant. Despite having the low amount of 4 main tasks estimated around 30 hours, it took me closer to 50 hours to create an interactive and controller-compatible UI that handles logic from two unique character blueprints and data tables.

𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔡𝔢𝔰𝔦𝔤𝔫 𝔭𝔯𝔬𝔠𝔢𝔰𝔰

For the first week, most of us met up to discuss the game's theme and what would go into it. After that talk, gathering references and creating the mock-ups in Figma was light work. There were more elements in the UI than what made the game, like more abilities and status effects that had to be omitted, but overall the design process went smoothly.

𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔰𝔥𝔬𝔭

To finish the shop's UI took me around two weeks to complete. In that time, I learned how to make a dynamic widget that updates both the HUD for each player character based on their unique data table. It took a tedious amount of iterations to make sure it worked with everything, especially because I was also working simultaneously as the other programmers so sometimes my code wouldn't line up to their pushes. A lot of debugging these past 5 weeks.

For one week, I worked on the HUD. At this point, I was three weeks in and learned a lot so I could finish the HUD more quickly. However, that didn't stop the issues from arising with referencing the characters, displaying correctly based on conditions, not stacking on top of each other, editing the buttons in Photoshop to make them look better, etc.

The most difficult part of the project was definitely controller support. If I could go back, I would use Common UI instead of Unreal's native widget designer. It wouldn't just help with gamepad compatibility but all around enhance the UI's look and feel. While the code in the end wasn't as convoluted as the shop's, the long editing then testing cycle put a toll on me. I probably played the first wave over 50 times in one week.

𝔏𝔢𝔞𝔯𝔫𝔦𝔫𝔤𝔰

As I said before, I learned a lot about Unreal Engine as a whole these past five weeks. I'm now able to create an interactive interface that has event dispatchers that can communicate with other widgets or characters, a game that responds accordingly to gamepad (for the most part), a merchant that gives you a new line as you weigh your decisions, a dynamic shop and that shows you what you need to see, and most importantly, a ton of experience in GitHub and communicating. I'm genuinely proud of what I was able to accomplish as a programmer, designer, and team member in this project.

ℜ𝔢𝔰𝔬𝔲𝔯𝔠𝔢𝔰

Blueprints:

Shop Event Graph: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/gp3-9wqj/

LoadAbilities function: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/3os2e-i_/

HUD Event Graph: https://blueprintue.com/blueprint/s5m9boa_/

Assets used:

Input Icons: https://kenney.nl/assets/input-prompts

Sound FX: https://kenney.nl/assets/interface-sounds

Ability Icons: https://game-icons.net/