Fcb Dev (2024). How To Make A Countdown Bar Timer | Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0uSTCe3VxI [Accessed 1 Mar. 2026].
Then on the end of the timer I created the passing out effect with the node I discovered from:
Ivica Milarić (2022). How to Create a Fade to Black (Fade Out) Effect in Unreal Engine – UE Beginner Tutorial. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ck8IBHdLic [Accessed 1 Mar. 2026].
To create the win screen I simply used a collision box that when walked into by the player would display a widget that covered the screen.
Then I textured them and exported them for use in unreal
I also took A screeen shot of the card and created a widget for when you pick it up.
On the coding side: The picking up code I simply added a extra class a variable onto the existing linetrace branch filter I had and I slightly tweaked the left click code to detect the reader component the send a message to it to start the animation.
The hallway and card reader are part of the same blueprint, but the door and card are spawned by the main card reader bp.
When the reader bp recieves the animation message it spawns a card and sets it to above the reader. It then swipes the card downwards and turns the light on the reader green. Then it messages the door it spawned to open.
The door then plays the open animation of the centre rotating then the sides sliding open.
I coded It with the ability to play in reverse as the door blueprint is seperate from the Reader blueprint and will be used in other areas around the map.
With the card being spawned by the reader in a location on the map, you have to find it to be able to enter the main room to escape, which is the puzzle.
This week I created a ccontrolled randomised spawning script for the starting and end pieces.
Firstly I created an array of all the tiles manually so I could garuntee they were in numerical order
For the first peice I simply generated a random number from 0-23 and used that number to take the location of a tile that has that index.
However I wanted it to also spawn in a random direction so I had to create a function that stopped it from being able to face the outer bounds and create a unsolveable puzzle.
The function took the index of tile, and checked for each outer location, then set the possible rotations to ones that would not face the outer bounds. There may have been more optimal ways to do this however I like to do things manually and accurately to minimise mistakes.
To spawn the next peice it is a little more complicated as it has to check for the previous peice and all the tiles in a 1 tile radius.
I created this function to check from an array of tiles then calculate the grid of tiles from the first selected tile and remove them from the possible spawn indexs.
I wrote it like this so I could reuse the code for the third tile and just change the arrays to the second ones instead of the first.
This is the 3rd peice being spawned. You can see the inputs to the previous 2 variables being set then the using them to spawn the peice correctly.
Their is one flaw with this code which is present with all peices including the placeable oness is that the spawn rotation and location only works in that one axis, as Im changing the world directions not the local directions, I looked into how to fix it much as I have higher priorities but I will make a blog on it at in the future.
Next blog I will probably work on the power being able to flow through the wires from the start to the 2 ends then set a variable when its open which I in further future will use to close/ Open doors.
To display the widget above the peices to pickup and also to pick them up with E I wrote.
The when E pressed runs a macro which runs:
Which defines which piece changes which variable in the UI hotbar. The which piece to collect variable is defined by:
Which gets the class from the line trace and sets the integer number for each type.
The tile selection to place onto I spent alot of time rewriting to work slightly better and this is what I ended up with which still wasnt perfect.
To hold the pieces in the air before placing I wrote:
Which I thought was pretty smart as I used the same piece of code for all 4 types of peices by using variables which I changed to define the spawn paramaters.
To place and pickip pieces onto and from the grid the code was pretty simple.
Riley Belleville (2022). Unreal Engine 5: How to Make an Object Pick Up Counter HUD with Blueprints. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://youtu.be/neF4dPJraAY?si=vW6jwaJCvVj73goR [Accessed 20 Nov. 2025].
BuildGamesWithJon (2022). How To Select (Highlight) Other Actors/Objects By Looking At Them In Unreal Engine 5. [online] YouTube. Available at:https://youtu.be/R7oLZL97XYo?si=pAPZawkYNMt0CUb7[Accessed 20 Nov. 2025].
Matt Aspland (2023). Press E To Interact | On Screen Prompt – Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://youtu.be/BpS1D6J09KE?si=BB1QyJmQPJLB2UtN[Accessed 20 Nov. 2025].
Matt Aspland (2023a). How To Make A 3D Interaction Prompt In Unreal Engine 5 (Tutorial). [online] YouTube. Available at: https://youtu.be/kB1_qxNUi9Q?si=BoaP83iqxqnLtDJn[Accessed 20 Nov. 2025].
Ghosts Of The Hollywood Garage (2024). Never Step On A Corpse Again – Enemy Collision Avoidance In UE5. [online] YouTube. Available at:https://youtu.be/4Eqb9bpGTFs?si=GBN55YQFvcR7tMpn[Accessed 20 Nov. 2025].
I like writing my own code so slowly as I understand unreal more I will rewrite parts that I dont understand from a video unless I think the videos methord Is the most logical or optimal.
I created basic peices and a container for them. All the sizes where scaled to the 0.2m² tile at the top which I will use as a the grid that I will snap the pieces to.
I then created a start and end piece with example textures that wont be used in unreal as they cant be transferred correctly. I will learn to use substance painter in a later blog
And I also exported them to unreal to be used as static mesh components in blueprints such as
I will start learning and practicing coding in the next dev log as I want to work on mechanics.
I decided to go for a partially alien and sci-fi theme of a space ship/station for my escape room.
I used msPaint to draw a simple and rough plan of how I may want the puzzles and rooms to fit together.
Most of my planning will be in the main Unit 7 page as theres no point writing things twice, this week all I worked on was rough planning to get a Idea on what to start producing.
