Game Info

We had to create a game for class, and my two partners wanted to do some kind of simulation to develop their skills in the field of AI. So, they proposed the idea of a natural environment simulator with animals. The idea was good, but I didn't feel like making a simulation, so I thought about it for a while and came up with the idea of adding a photographic component to the game, allowing the player to express themselves through the camera.

The game ended up featuring deer and crows trying to survive in a natural environment, searching for food and water, with the player being able to capture these moments through photography.

Camera

Problems & Making a Tutorial

Since I had never done it before, I didn't know where to start. So, the first thing I did was search the documentation and the internet on how to capture the game screen and convert it to a texture to use it in the interface. None of the searches yielded results; there were approaches to what I was looking for, but they were either outdated or insufficient, and all the relevant information was in Blueprints.

Tired of not finding answers, I tried to translate what people were doing in Blueprints into code. Although the conversion isn't 100% accurate since not everything that can be done in Blueprints can be done the same way in code, I managed to capture screenshots and save them as a texture, which I then converted into a dynamic material to use with the UI widgets. With this, I was able to work on creating the widget and class that would handle the camera, as well as the widget and class to manage the photo gallery.

The part I couldn't do in code was saving images to disk, so I had to do that in Blueprints. Another thing I couldn't implement in the project was post-processing effects. However, when I changed the image format so they could be saved to disk, I realized that was the issue. With the new format, I could apply post-processing effects, giving the player more freedom to express themselves. Unfortunately, since I discovered this so late, I didn't have time to implement it correctly before the class deadline.

Making a Tutorial

After spending a lot of time trying to implement the mechanic with almost no information on the subject, I decided to make a tutorial to explain to other users interested in adding a photo mode to their game. The tutorial is very basic and includes things I don't do in my project, but it's simplified as much as possible to make it easy to understand and test. Everything is hosted in a GitHub repo [this] with a readme explaining the process step by step, along with the entire project for you to try out.

Future Development

Now that I can save images in the game and on disk, and I know how to apply post-processing effects, I'd like to continue the development. This time, I can focus more on enriching the player experience rather than just trying to implement the mechanic. However, to do this, I would like to restructure the code with the new knowledge I have gained from developing UI for Unreal. I plan to revisit the mechanic and use it in another project to make the most of it.