Still in beta? Pfft...

When starting this game, I knew I wanted to support gamepad and keyboard inputs. Like a good little developer, I’m always trying to make sure I’m using the latest standards for the platform that I’m working in. For Unreal Engine (5.3+), the way to handle player inputs is using the Enhanced Input system with input actions and input mapping contexts. Great! The wonderful tutorials from Cobra Code covered these things. He even showed how to map multiple input types to the same input actions. Even better! I’m set!

Again, trying to be a good dev on this hobby project, I was interested in the tutorial via gameplay route of doing things. I was ready to have the action mapped glyph appear dynamically depending on whether you’re using gamepad vs keyboard input. The uninformed way of doing this would be to have a monster logic tree detecting what platform / input method was last used, then switch back and forth between the appropriate glyphs to display to the player. In fact, I was headed down this path, but I found a “better way” with some googling.

The Common UI plugin.

Apparently born from and/or brought over from internal tools that Epic’s Fortnite developers use, it seeks to address the very issue described and also provide a common way to display and manage complicated / layered UI stacks. Let’s do it! Oh…

Beta… Hmmm… Meh! What could go wrong? It’s from Epic Games!

I’ll skip to the end - kind of - it worked! Beautifully! I was so happy to get the new better way working. I saved my work, committed my progress to GitHub, and went to bed. The next day, I went to go test the work that I did, and I started losing my mind. The glyphs did not show! The dynamic text worked, but not the icons/images!

I did some hunting, and came across a dead end post on reddit with someone having the same issue. Not good.

I beat my head against the wall for a while, but I eventually centered myself. “Don’t have negative thoughts. Remember your mantra.”

Yes, my mantra. When I encounter issues that threaten to impact my progress or enjoyment, I take a breath and tell myself: “Keep it simple, stupid.”

So I did. I abandoned what I knew was better game design. I removed the dynamic tutorial prompts, and replaced them with a simple controls dump. As a hobbyist with limited free time, I can’t afford to get caught up on minutia. I’m not looking to make a best-seller here or an any-seller for that matter. I’m just trying to get a marginally interesting prototype up on itch, learn a bunch of Unreal, and have a bit of fun along the way.