I am completely new to gamedev and UE (although i have watched some beginner tutorials, mostly on UI) i want to create a 2D-puzzle game, is it possible to make a game that’s entirely comprised of UI?
Would things like this be possible in an UI only game?:
You will struggle. Anyone would. The engine is not really geared towards this. But you could treat everything as if was 2d. There’s even a brand new fancy ortho rendering mode that could help.
Do check out paper 2d on yt first to see what it can do.
Yes i have PaperZD installed, the thing is that this puzzle game will have no real “character”. You will just be clicking on different elements, like 2d boxes and stuff.
Maybe i’ll just have to have an invisible character or have it out of view of the screen…
You do not need a character to make a game. It really is not required. Is your game’s board / playing field larger than the viewport? Do you need to pan the camera around? If so, a simple pawn with a camera attached is enough.
Do note that your title says UI. Theres is massive difference between 2D and UI.
While the User Interface (Unreal Motion Graphics - UMG) would be borderline awkward for gameplay, interacting with sprites in a traditinal (paper) 2d sense is rather straighforward.
Yes the playing board will be bigger than the viewport in some levels, after some reading/watching more tutorials it seems that the 2D route will be the most optimal.
I’m just a bit confused about the logic involved with saving things like objects in an inventory, every tutorial uses characters to do so (things like collecting coins). But that just seems like a blueprint knowledge issue on my part. I already know it will take some time to figure out those kind of things.
Because it’s a common thing to do and comes across as natural. You do not need to, and probably should avoid it, tbh. Inventories are beasts and should be managed by a separate actor that can be attached to something else. If there’s a character class in the game, it will be a very busy class and should be separate from the inventory management.
How about a chest full of items? It has an inventory but is not a character. An inventory is just a bunch of data + fancy display interface.
Ok i understand now after that example with the chest.
There will be a lot of information related to the inventory, so those are some good tips.
I think i know how to proceed, thx 4 the help 
Hi there, it seems we are both in the same position here. I’m also fairly new to game dev, and I’m also looking for ways to make a UI based game. I’m more into unreal, mainly because it uses relies on blueprints more than code. I don’t have any knowledge on coding.
I have explored the UMG option, but as someone said before it has its issues. I also have tried to explore the 2D way, but the logic Unreal use it doesn’t fit my needs. I haven’t tried Paper ZD, but it seems that have some of the same problems the general approach to 2D Unreal has.
As Unity relies more on code it seems a more daunting to try a solution there, but after many frustrating attempts to get what i need in Unreal i just decide to give it a try. There are many available codes in GitHub and toy can try ChatGPT if you get stuck in code. I just found some resources that could help you. A course and some tools.
https://www.udemy.com/course/modern-unity-ui-with-ui-toolkit/
There are also two other engines aimed to visual novel adventure games that could do the trick.
As the absence of a player character on sctreen i think there would be no problem with any of this solutions because im looking to develop also a game with no character on screen.
Good Luck!!