Iaith

Introduction:: Everyone

As a game programmer, I designed and developed this minimum value product, "Iaith", in Unreal Engine 5.1 over a 16-week boot camp. To make Serious Games fun,  I leveraged the power of gamification, and employ various gameplay mechanics to foster language acquisition. Conceptually, Iaith aims to engage players in challenging puzzles, engaging quests, and exciting mini-games, each carefully designed to reinforce vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, bolstered by real-time feedback and personalized learning pathways. Join me. Let's "Make serious games fun again"!

Gameplay:: Gamers

The game is set in a fictional Welsh primary school. The player is a 10-year-old new student who needs to go home after the closing bell rings. The player, who does not know the school well, starts from the toy room and walks through the hallways and classrooms asking and answering questions from bilingual teachers to find his way home.

Controls:: Players

• std::cout<<In-game Instructions<<"i"
  
• std::cout<<Movement<<"WASD"
• std::cout<<Jump<<"Space"
• std::cout<<Look around<<"Right-mouse button"
  
• std::cout<<Talk to Teachers<<"t"
  
• std::cout<<Selecting Answers<<"Left-mouse button"
  
• std::cout<<Pause | Resume<<"ESC"
  
• std::cout<<Checkpoint<<"5"
  

Code:: Programmers

As the saying goes, the best way to balance the usage of  C++ and Blueprints is to use both, if possible. Blueprint visual scripting hasn’t been designed to entirely replace C++, although it’s an amazing form of scripting. I employed C++ for general core systems and used Blueprints for specific gameplay mechanics that extend those systems and need fast iteration for balancing and testing.

For example, in Iaith,  the player movements are all in C++ to improve faster runtime performance, explicit design, and more control over exposing variables or functions. A snippet of how I implement  is shown below:

The ability to use the full environment that Unreal offers, the ability to use all macros and systems from pure plain code, and the ability to debug advanced use cases with data value breakpoints. Another example is the SpringArm and the CameraBoom as forward-declared in the header file:

Design Patterns:: Fine Programmers & Nerds

I largely adopted a more creational pattern or design during the development of Iaith as I aimed at securing provisions of various object creation mechanisms, which increase flexibility and reuse of existing code. This approach paid off as I created components like the chat and question-answer systems iteratively.

Join Me :: Recruiters, Gamers, Comments

As I aim to "Make serious games fun again", I hope you will be supportive in any way you can. This is just the MVP of greater stuff to follow suit. I would love you to comment, share the idea or perhaps BuyMeACoffee :)!