Overview
Between Worlds is a first-person single-player puzzle game made in Unreal Engine 4. The player must rotate power nexuses to solve puzzles scattered across different dimensions. In this demo, there are three dimensions, each with its own lock tied to the level exit. The player must open all three locks to complete the level.
Tech Summary
Genre | 1st-Person Puzzle Platformer |
Team Size | 1 Developer |
Engine | Unreal Engine 4 |
Platform | PC |
Development Time | 3 Months |
Content
Studying the Base Code
Before I extend an existing system, I like to analyze how it works. So for one week, I took the time to look through each blueprint in the framework and analyze the overall relationship. This allowed me to mark places where I could extend the code and also places where I could modify the framework to better suit the needs of the project.
EVENT DISPATCHERS
Quite a few programming languages employ events in their systems. Unreal Blueprints are no different. By leveraging their Event Dispatchers, I made puzzles that could work in a sequence without having to hard-code every interaction.
This made for very easy iteration as I added, removed and rearranged puzzle elements in a sequence.
APPLYING EVENTS INTO UNREAL
I created two Blueprint Components:
Caller
On Call, it calls any Receivers subscribed to it.
Receiver
On Receive, it activates the Blueprint it is attached to.
Whenever the game starts, every Caller looks at its list of receivers and adds them to the receiver list. Whenever the player plays the level, any callers the player triggers will reach out and activate their respective list of receivers.
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