Learning Unreal Blueprints for VR

I enrolled in Udacity’s Learn Unreal VR Program to gain a better understanding of Unreal Engine and to learn blueprint coding. I have used my VR headset for gaming and 3D modeling purposes, but never to develop any sort of interface or user interaction. As these are growing interests of mine, this course was a perfect fit to gain new skill sets in these areas.

The course’s primary focus was not to teach you how to model or bring assets into Unreal, but rather on how to create an experience for the user. For example, I learned how to set up a player pawn and user controls, set up blueprints for assets to make them interactive to the user, and how to begin creating interfaces for timers, scores, etc.

The first project was a to create a game called “Kitchen Cleanup”. The game involved the user picking up randomly spawned plates and cleaning them in the sink. My job was to:

1.  Create a player pawn with a controller that had the ability to interact with plates (using blueprint interfaces)
2.  Spawn plates every few seconds that could be interacted with (randomly spawned at target points)
3.  Create a sink that would read if a plate was in it (AKA overlapping it’s collision box) and “clean it” (destroy the actor after a 2 second delay)
4. Develop a timer and score system that the player could see, a method to start and end the game (event dispatchers) and a start menu (interface widgets)

The course ultimately gave me the skills I needed to develop the game. Here’s a preview (sorry, WordPress only accepts my grainy GIF rather than video):

Other than the actual mechanics of the game, I threw together the main menu logo in Illustrator:

I also added a particle emitter to depict “bubbles” near the sink (a texture created in photoshop). Overall, the game was a blast to make. I will make a second post regarding the second project once it’s been reviewed by Udacity.