Introduction

The way I can describe Sunder is that it’s a proof of concept of a 3D puzzle game inspired by Captain Toad Treasure Tracker.
I worked on it in bursts on and off in UE5 with a mix of C++ for systems and gameplay and Blueprints for customizations.

Levels

I had made a LevelManager in C++ which uses Unreal’s “SubLevels” to only load the level you’re currently playing, which saves on performance.
This makes new levels easy to create: each one is “contained” and can’t affect the others.
Using a LevelManager also has the added benefit of being able to add events such as “OnLevelSet” to play cutscenes for example.
And because everything is event based, making a debug tool to move between levels is also very easy to do. Sunder Level Settings

Gameplay

I had a lot of different ideas for gameplay. The first one was to solve puzzles by placing your “keys” in the level and depending on the key you placed, you would lose that input (the game was called “Out of Control” back then).
I had then switched to a different kind of “Out of Control” where you would be unable to stop moving and have to climb a tower and avoid obstacles, sort of like Geometry Dash but in 3D.
Now I have a few ideas written down where the islands (levels) are split apart and you have to complete quests to put them back together, but I just haven’t found the time to add all of this in yet.

UI & Menus

Seeing as I kept having different ideas for gameplay, I started working on some menus because I already had a rough idea on how I wanted them to look: simple but cartoon-ish.
When creating these menus, I absolutely wanted them to work with a controller and wanted them to feel like they were made for them.
I designed all of the controller glyphs to match the style of the menus and built different widgets to make adding controller support easier (namely the “Action Bar” at the bottom right of the screen).
Here’s what I ended up with (the switching at the beginning is to show that you can switch between keyboard and controller): Looking back, if I’m going to work on this game again I’ll probably redo the menus with Common UI since a lot of things are hard coded and can be more polished.

What I learned