Introduction

This was my first real project in Unreal. I made the game and the assets myself during my last year of high school for my baccalauréat diploma.
Brainout is a multiplayer Serious Game where you are on a Mario Party-like board and have to roll a dice and answer questions depending on which spot you land on.
It is supposed to help students learn by having fun, and to let teachers easily create questions and see which students need help with the subject.
It also supports localization in English and French.

Here’s what I did

• Designed and made all of the assets in the game.
• Designed and made all of the game’s menus.
• Coded all of the game’s logic, scoring etc.
• Created a C++ plugin to expose Unreal’s JSON serialization to be used in Blueprints.
• Created a C++ plugin to use Windows’ file dialogs to open and save files.

How it works

When starting a lobby, the teacher can create their questions within the editor in game and save them to reuse them later.

The students can then scan for a lobby on the network, join and set their name.
Once in game, the current player can roll the dice and depending on where they land on the map, the way they answer their question will change:

• If they land on a regular question, no modifier is applied.
• If they land on a flash question, they have half the time to answer.
• Other modifiers were planned such as minigames inspired by Mario Party but I didn’t have time to add them in.

The game lasts until everyone has answered the questions correctly once.
Afterwards, the teacher gets a result screen showing the time each player took, and the amount of mistakes they made.

Problems I encountered

I had used Unreal a little bit before but never made a multiplayer game, so I had to figure out how to handle server authority and how to sync up values.
Another issue I had was that I needed to save files so teachers can save their questions. Unreal didn’t expose anything in Blueprints so I had to create a plugin (my first time using C++) to expose these features.

Conclusion

This was the first time working on a video game project and I really enjoyed it, especially hearing feedback from my teachers and seeing my classmates test out the game.