Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial - Make Your Own Board Game Part 8: Landing on Spaces
Why It Matters
It shows how to implement core board‑game mechanics—landing actions, scoring, and extra turns—in Unreal Engine 5, accelerating indie developers’ ability to prototype and monetize digital board games.
Key Takeaways
- •Implemented landed and passed-by events for board spaces in UE5.
- •Added point-scoring system via player controller functions for gameplay.
- •Demonstrated passing pawn reference to board space for scoring.
- •Showed handling double rolls to grant extra turns.
- •Encouraged customization of space actions and future widget direction choices.
Summary
The video continues Ryan Laly’s Unreal Engine 5 board‑game series, focusing on how to trigger actions when a pawn lands on or passes a board space. He replaces generic event dispatchers with explicit functions, wiring the pawn’s movement logic to call "OnLanded" and "OnPassed" on each space, and prints simple debug messages to confirm the flow.
Key technical steps include creating a point‑tracking integer on the player controller, adding a "ScorePoints" function, and casting the pawn’s controller to the custom board‑game controller to award points based on each space’s configurable value. Laly also demonstrates handling double‑rolls: a boolean flag determines whether the turn ends or the player receives an immediate extra roll, effectively modeling Monopoly‑style extra turns.
Throughout the demo he uses concrete examples—printing "passed" and "landed", assigning one‑point start tiles, five‑point regular tiles, and ten‑point corners—to illustrate the data flow between pawn, board space, and controller. He notes that more complex mechanics like tokens or wedges can be stored similarly, and hints at a forthcoming widget‑driven direction‑choice system for multi‑path spaces.
The tutorial equips developers with a reusable pattern for board‑game interactions in UE5, allowing rapid customization of space effects, scoring, and turn logic. By exposing these mechanics as editable properties, creators can prototype a wide range of tabletop‑style experiences without rebuilding core systems each time.
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