Undefined signal (unfinished) by zer0nim
(edit) Sorry, I didn't know the unfinished category existed, just changed it. This is my first LD.
There is no gameplay loop so I didn't package a build, but I've attached a YouTube video if you're curious how it looks.
I worked solo. This was my first jam using Unreal Engine. My goal was to learn new parts of the engine rather than ship a "finished" game.
After thinking about the theme "Signal", I wanted to implement something inspired by the radio scanner from Outer Wilds. I also wanted to make the world invisible, revealed only by a lidar-style scan periodically, but I didn't have the time to implement that second idea.
I modeled the scanner in Blender and used a render target to display a widget on the screen material.
I created the sine-wave effect material in UE, which was a bit tricky to get right given my limited experience with material shaders. I spent a good chunk of time on the arm animation, blended with the UE 5.6 first-person template movement. I'm not used to animation work either, and there aren't many tutorials yet for this UE 5.6 first-person template, so I had to dig into the code and blueprints to understand it.
Still, it was a fun jam and I hope to come better prepared next time!
Tools used: - Unreal Engine 5.6 - Blender - Git - Textures from: https://kenney.nl/assets
| Gameplay | https://youtu.be/1NcZneM6LOg?is=aFud58N7r5Znuy9K |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/undefined-signal |
Ratings
| Given | 11🗳️ | 6🗨️ |
For the screen on the 3D model, I assigned a separate material and texture in Blender. Make sure to UV unwrap the screen so it takes up the full UV coordinate space, otherwise the widget won't display correctly on the mesh.
Once imported in Unreal it should have created a separate material dedicated to the screen, open it and create a parameter texture assigned to the base color.
Then I added a Widget component on my tool blueprint, selected it, set the Widget source as the one I wanted to render, set the render size as my desired widget size, and toggled off Render on Main Pass so the component doesn't render in the game world but only on it's render target.
Then on the blueprint Begin Play, create a dynamic material instance of the screen material and store a reference as bp variable, and then on Tick get the render target texture from the Widget component and assign it to the material instance parameter texture you created earlier using the Set Texture Parameter node.
I learned this by following the YouTube tutorial:
https://youtu.be/37UmUAdIHss?is=7ZJB3FKIzZA2lySW
It also explains how to size your widget accordingly
And
https://youtu.be/mev1kb3d_Wo?is=jPpg1K39veQOZ0a_
Wich made me discover the "render on main pass toggle"