The initial idea for this game came to me one day too soon to Christmas. I sat down and continued working on the Realm Ship I had been making in Blender. The initial idea was going to be that you would go to different Realms and fix these shield generators while under attack from the various monsters within that Realm.
An outside lit up view of the Realms Ship. An image of the back part of the ship. The right back wing's mesh is messed up due to it being mirrored and not recalculated to the outside.
Unfortunately, making an entire game like this before Christmas as a present is not within my limits. So I stuck with something quick and easy. I recreated the very first episode's area. Not perfect, but good enough. I then placed a cube in that area. That would be our shield generator.
The almighty cube aka. Shield Generator #476
I then made all the mechanics. Teleporting, the quiz, pausing.
Teleport Function
Teleporting was pretty simple, you tell the game to move the player somewhere else, put a screen on top of that and bam you have a teleport.
An image of the screen that pops up when transitioning between levels (realms). An image of the blueprints that power the portal trigger. An image containing the blueprints that power the loading of the other realm, unloading of current area and teleport sequence. An image of the blueprints within the Teleporting UI.
The Quiz
The quiz was a lot more difficult, I had to figure out how exactly to implement such an idea in a way that would work seamlessly. I ended up going with the messy method of changing the text on the buttons, and having the game read the selected button and if it matched the preset answer, it would move on to the next question and the cube would flash green. If not, the cube would flash red.
A blueprint of the shield gen actor, the cube itself containing the overlap trigger which activates the questionare, and the events for when the question was answered correctly or incorrectly, changing the material of the cube to red or green. Blueprint showing the functionality of the questionare. The UI is created and we initially set the answers for the first question, so the game knows what to do when the answer is wrong or right. The text box was an old concept taken out in favour of the buttons. A continuation of the previous BP, moving down we see the 'Set Answers' event, which checks through the question list and see's what question we are currently on. If we find the question we set the answer buttons text to the corresponding answer based on the question integer we are on and pick from the list, which is carefully listed so that each answer is numbered exactly with the questions, so no extra work needs to be done to find the = answers to the questions. If we can't find the question, it means we move on and assume the repairs, and thus the questionare is complete. Continuation of the previous BP, moving down we see the 4 buttons. When clicked, they check if the answer text they contain matches up with the correct answer within the 'Text Answer List' and then output to our 'Check Answer' function whether it was true or false. The print strings are just there for dev purposes. A blueprint that grabs from the 'Question List' array and picks at random one of the questions to set as the question text. This was taken out as it just spams different questions, as this is constantly running every frame. This was not ideal and looking further, it wouldn't have worked with the current system regardless, as we need a linear design, or it all falls apart. A function within the previous blueprint, named 'Check Answer' which grabs the output from earlier. If the previous output was true, we get the length of our question list, and add 1 to the current question. This moves us forward in the questionare, sets the buttons to the next questions answers, and makes the cube flash green telling the player that they got the question correct. If the output was false, we make the cube flash red, and the player is to choose another answer.
Pausing Time
Pausing was simple but I didn't just want a pause menu, it needed music. And I already used some music from the original Realms series, so it was time I made my own. I loaded up FL Studio and got to work. I just kinda found a specific sound I liked and placed the notes in somewhat of a rhythm, then I copied those same notes but moved them to 2 notes lower. And voila, this would be the pause menu music, dubbed 'Alone without a home'.
An image of the pause menu in engine. A blueprint view of the Pause Menu in action. Obviously, when the menu is up, it pauses the game, sets your input to only interact with the ui as well as showing the cursor on the screen, and spawning the music in as well as saving a reference to this music for later when we choose to resume and fade out the music. Other events are just hover sounds for when the mouse hovers over the buttons, and the quit button quits the game.
Final
This project was fun to make although its short and with more time more effort could've been added, but for a short experience what more do you need? This was Project Realms, a Christmas present for my friend, and memory of the series that blew our minds. Thanks for reading.
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