After deciding on a project and getting the approval from the professor, our group will be working on the Escape Room Challenge. My group met up to plan for our project and we had a brainstorming session on how we wanted our project to turn out. We all had many different ideas and after walking away from the meeting, our plan is a mixture of ideas from all teammates. Our Escape Room Challenge is going to have three rooms, all of which containing themes and Easter eggs to the entire OSU Computer Science program. To make all of this come to fruition, we needed to decide on which technologies we were going to use.
We knew that a game engine would be the best choice and one that peaked all of our interest. The next step was to decide if we wanted to use Unreal Engine 5 or Unity. With me having experience with C++ and my other teammates wanting to learn more, we chose Unreal Engine 5. Before our meeting, each of us took some time researching the two game engines and we came to the conclusion that UE5 would be the best fit for us and what we wanted to accomplish.
One of the things that we like about UE5 is the visual building aspect. Rather than coding the entire project, UE5 offers a great experience that allows the user to create an environment simply by visually roaming around and changing the environment to how they want them to be changed. I really like this aspect of UE5 because I feel like it gives us developers more freedom in what we want to do, especially as we are all new to game development and none of us have used Unreal Engine. The other thing that I like about Unreal Engine is the blueprints that you can bring into your virtual world and completely change the scene how you want it to be changed. For example, if you want a certain car in your environment, you can download a blueprint for that car and bring it into your game. Also, if you want a certain environment – say by the beach – you can download that environment and have the setting on the beach.
When creating three completely different escape rooms, being able to visually see what you are doing is great and that is what Unreal Engine does. We have one room that is a jungle setting (Python), one room is set in a modern cafe (Web Development), and my room is set on the beach (C – or sea), and with Unreal Engine, it will really help us adapt our environments to how we want them to be.
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