Author: Kye Langer-Freeman
Posted on: 12/07/2025

Part 1: The Problem

This week, as the lead UI Programmer, I started on building the Main Menu for our game and getting the Play and Quit functions working. While the technical side of the menu was fairly straightforward, I ran into a major roadblock, our production time was cut short due to reduced class time this week because of the holidays. This significantly limited how much development I could complete and prevented me from getting a lot done. 

In addition to my UI responsibilities, I also took on a big portion of the Prioritized Feature List documentation, which is essential for planning, scoping, and keeping the entire team aligned. Because this was a large written deliverable and required careful breakdowns of our game systems, it took a meaningful amount of the limited time we had. Between the shortened schedule and the design documentation, I wasn’t able to get as far on the UI as originally planned.

Part 2: Problem Solution

To work around the reduced time, I focused on completing as much as I could get done in the time that the assignment was due. I made sure the Main Menu widget loaded correctly into the viewport, set the proper game mode for the menu map, and bound each button to its correct Unreal function. This does ensure that despite the shorter production window, the team still has a working entry point into the game.