econ101 was made in 48 hours with a small team of 3 for Massey's gamejam. i handled asset implementation + all in-engine work.
the theme was 'growth', so we decided to make a mock of facebook marketplace/trademe where you can buy items and upsell to buyers.
econ 101 was made through the lens of 'dropshippers.' lately, i keep seeing media which follows a particular pipeline: drop out of university, pursue dropshipping, fail, learn the 'secret', become rich, then they say "buy my course to learn how!"
econ 101 was a satirical take on the aforementioned.
The 'How to play' popup in econ101.
Screenshot from searching 'dropshipping tiktok'. Just an example of what we parodied: dropshipping with a 'buy my course' advertised in the description.
when starting the game jam, we ran into a slight issue. one of our team members - the one with most coding knowledge - had dropped out. additionally, our teacher who usually supervises the game jams to help with errors was sick with covid.
this meant I took up all of the unreal + git work with no advice. to be honest, it was quite hard as i effectively launched into a crash course of unreal dialogue systems + ui work. most of the work was done in a widgetswitcher blueprint, spread across seperate ui elements.
Admittedly, they're not the most efficient blueprints i've done - but for 48 hours I'm satisfied with the end result. my lovely team members, jonathan and finn made the very cool 3d models and fake websites/art assets.
Widget switcher - I had seperate widget blueprints act as the seperate buy/sell page that were nested within the widgetswitcher.
the amount of blueprint work in the widget switcher alone.
The buy page nested each buyable item in a uniform grid panel. the buyable items themselves all functioned as buttons. This was the same for the sell page - except the buyable items were replaced by characters. each character portrait functioned as a button which triggered a popup and their conversations.
one of the buyable items
the code within the buyable items
the dialogue within one of the character blueprints. each character interaction was coded seperately and held three different outcomes.
after four minutes, the end of game is triggered and you receive a rating based on the amount of profit made, followed by your end balance. there were three ratings "Bad", "Average" and "Good". players could reload the level or quit from this screen.
overall, this was a really fun (and stressful) 48 hours. I'd definitely do it again. i feel like I learned a lot more about unreal's widget blueprints and how to use git effectively across a team.
