Introduction and question on best practices for interactive objects

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hi All,

I am a c++ developer that’s been working in the business solutions industry for 6 years. Game development has always been an interest of mine, but I never really got into it. With Unreal Engine being more affordable now - I thought I would give game development a go.

I have a question regarding the implementation of interactive objects - specifically objects that can be changed by players (like changing the tyres on a car).
Lets use a simple example. A gear assembly that consists of 2 gears and a drive belt. Should you

  1. Create a Blueprint that contains both gears and the drive belt - then add in custom code to change the rendering/animation of the gears when a player swaps out any of the components?

  2. Create a Blueprint for each of the components, and then use them as separate objects in your level that interact with each other?

2

In general I think it is better to build things as smaller re-usable units that communicate, but it’s hard to make hard rules about anything in game development!

3

I see. I will play around with different options then. I assume you can create all your sub modules as blueprints, and then create a blueprint which contains all these “sub-blueprints” as a single component?