UE5 Game Mechanics

Name: UE5 Game Mechanics
Author: Ken Geary

Learn how to create a game inventory system from scratch

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Course: On-Demand

Hello, welcome to this lesson in Unreal Engine. In this chapter we will learn how to create an inventory system in Unreal Engine. Open the Intermediate project. The animation level is default and it should load up. We will save this level with a new name. So go to File, Save Current Level As, we'll go to our Maps folder and we'll name this, Inventory. Go to Project Settings and we'll set our defaults to this level. So both the startup and default game map will be the inventory level. Close this panel. For the first part, we'll gather and create some simple assets to use this pickup items. Open the Content Drawer. Again, you can open it with Control + Space or Command + Space on a Mac. Open our Content folder. We'll create a new folder. I'm gonna right-click, New Folder. We'll call this, Inventory. Now navigate to the Starter Content using the left side panel and the Shapes folder. Back in the left panel, scroll back up till you can see the Inventory folder. We're gonna grab several shapes and put them into our Inventory folder as copies. We'll select the capsule, click and drag to the Inventory folder and we'll select Copy Here. We're not gonna use move, we're gonna copy. We're gonna do the same with the pyramid shape, into our Inventory, copy and a torus, Inventory and copy. We go back to our Content Drawer and our Inventory folder and we see the shapes are there. We're also gonna do is dock this layout 'cause we'll be accessing it a lot. So over to the right top of the panel you see Dock in Layout, we'll click that. Next is we wanna give these shapes some color so they look a little nicer. So we're gonna right-click, click Material. We're gonna make this our Master Material, so we'll call it, M_Master. Double Click to open the material editor. We're gonna keep this very simple. So we're just gonna click three and click. This is the vector three node that we use for color. We'll wire this to the base color. Select the color swatch, two clicks and we'll just make this white just by pulling the value up to the top. Click OK. We're gonna right-click, Convert to Parameter and we'll call this, Color. Click Save. Close the panel. Then we're gonna right-click the Master Material, we'll create a Material Instance. We'll call this first one MI for Material Instance, red. Then we can right-click, Duplicate, you could also hit Control + D or Command + D on a Mac. We'll call this one, MI Green then once more duplicate. We'll rename this, MI double-click MI Blue. This opens up the Material Instance editor. I'll just scale this window end a little bit. And over here we can toggle on the color and we can change the color swatch. I'll make this blue. I hit OK, Save. Leave this panel open, double-click MI Green. Once again toggle on the color so we can edit it and in the color swatch we'll go to green, hit OK, save. Double-click red, same process. Toggle on color, click the color swatch. We'll go to a red, hit OK. We'll save and now we're done with the instances and we'll close the panel. We will now add these materials to our shapes. Double-click the capsule. This brings up our mesh editor and over in the Material Slot, we'll drag in our blue, we'll save. We'll leave this panel open. Double-click the pyramid shape, we'll drag in green for the material and save and double-click the torus and we'll drag in our red material and save and we'll close this panel. For our inventory system we need static mesh objects as our pickups, which we now have but we also need a thumbnail image for each one. You can use any screen image capture utility that comes with your operating system. For this lesson, we'll use Windows Snipping Tool. So we'll open the Start menu, type in, snip. Select the Snipping Tool, go to your Options, Settings, scroll down and make sure Save snips is toggled on. So we'll have an image save request that will come up and we'll hit the back arrow. We will click, New. The default is to drag a window around the item you wanna make a snip of. So we'll start with the capsule. Do this as carefully as you can, does not have to be exact. Just a nice square shape around the capsule. And we'll go to our Save Disk icon. We'll go to our Downloads folder, select your type as PNG and we'll call this, Blue Capsule. We'll leave this window up. Click New. We'll go over to the pyramid, again right around the black area, we'll drag out a square as we can. We'll save this one as Green Pyramid. And once more, New. We'll go around the torus as square as we can, you don't have to be exact. And we'll save this, Red Torus. Save, and now we can close the Snipping Tool window and we do not have these icons loaded in yet, we do have to import those. If you prefer you can clean up your images and resize them to 256 by 256 in a paint program like Photoshop or GIMP. Now before we import these images, let's organize our folder. So we're gonna right-click, make a new folder. We'll call one, Shapes. Right-click, New Folder, Materials and once more, right-click, New Folder, Textures. Shift + Select your three shapes, drag them to your Shapes folder. In this case, we're gonna say Move Here. Then we'll take all our materials, Shift + Select, click and drag to Materials and Move Here. Now we're neatened up pretty well. Let's open up our Texture folder. And now we'll import the textures we just snipped. We'll right-click, Import to, go to downloads. I'm gonna Shift + Select all three and click Open. And we'll convert them to its image format and you can see them listed now. Let's save all, Save Selected. In the next lesson, we will continue building the inventory system by creating a pickup actor blueprint in Unreal Engine. Thanks for watching.

Intermediate Provider : Ken Geary 4 Lessons · 32m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese

Course Description

Unreal Engine 5 allows you to create fully functional interactive games or product simulations. In these lessons, you will learn how to create an on-screen inventory system using Widget Blueprints and custom Blueprint-coded pickup objects.

This course is divided into four parts and will cover all the aspects of creating an inventory system in UE5. First, you will create your own simple assets using shapes from the Starter Content and screen grabs of the asset thumbnails. Then, you will continue to build a Widget blueprint for the screen display during game play, selecting Actor Blueprints for pickup objects and a Level Blueprint that oversees and controls the action and updates, as well as displaying the Widget itself.

What You'll Learn

Create texture assets using screen capture from asset thumbnails
Build a Widget Blueprint for the on-screen display during gameplay
Code Widgets using Blueprint scripting in Unreal Engine 5
Select Actor Blueprints for custom pickup objects
Create Level Blueprint code to control item pickups and their on-screen display
Build a complete on-screen inventory system across four parts

Key Takeaways

Unreal Engine 5 allows you to create fully functional interactive games or product simulations.
The course teaches how to create an on-screen inventory system using Widget Blueprints and custom Blueprint-coded pickup objects.
Simple assets are made using shapes from the Starter Content and screen grabs of the asset thumbnails.
A Level Blueprint oversees and controls the action and updates while also displaying the Widget itself.
The course is divided into four parts and covers all aspects of creating an inventory system in UE5.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does this course cover?

It covers all aspects of creating an on-screen inventory system in Unreal Engine 5 using Widget Blueprints and custom Blueprint-coded pickup objects, including creating texture assets, building a Widget Blueprint for the gameplay display, selecting Actor Blueprints for pickup objects, and creating a Level Blueprint that controls the action and updates.

How is the course structured?

The course is divided into four parts, delivered as four lessons: Game Inventory Systems Part 1 through Part 4.

What skills will I gain from this course?

You will work with the Unreal Engine game engine, game programming, and Unreal Blueprint, including UnrealScript and the Unreal Development Kit.

How are the game assets created in this course?

You create your own simple assets using shapes from the Starter Content and screen grabs of the asset thumbnails, then create texture assets using screen capture.