CAGD 373 - Blog Post 4
- Els Fouche
- Dec 3, 2025
- 3 min read
Group 1 - Goblin Camp
This project is a re-creation of Baldur's Gate 3's Goblin Camp, specifically the entrance to the former Selunite temple. Our micro game loop involves breaking or unlocking containers in order to collect enough dice to access the inner sanctum of the camp. Notably and unlike Baldur's Gate 3 the player begins with a 10-sided die, otherwise known as a d10, and may collect more to unlock containers with higher 'difficulty class' (DC) values as well as the final door. Available dice to collect include a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20.
Credits:
Julian Kroeger-Miller: Lead & Flex
Destiny Rose Smith: 3D Artist
Devin G. Monaghan: Texture Artist
Els S. Fouché: Programming & Design
Break & Recovery
The beginning of the sprint my ability to work was still heavily impacted by my injury (mentioned in this post). However, our team was allotted a week off which gave me time to rest and recuperate. My injury has healed significantly but the quantity of work I was able to accomplish was still effectively halved.
Dice Re-Rolling
To hit the design goals for our micro game loop we wanted the player to have the ability to re-roll dice should they fail at a skill check.
There's a fair amount to discuss in this video. First and most salient, the player may now spend inspiration points to re-roll a failed check. Beyond this functionality, I also tried to improve the overall quality of the UI. Note the visual effect applied to the result value; I feel that this significantly enhances the experience. I would like to add a particle effect or animation on top of this, time permitting, to improve it further.
Based on feedback I received regarding how it feels to fail a roll, I updated the re-roll prompt with a time delay until the prompt appears. This delay can be skipped with a key press. I also created the UI elements displayed above and, while rough, they are a large step up in terms of quality over the place-holders. Let's go over some of these changes in more detail.
Dice Display, Font Updates, General UI Improvements
An additional feature we added this sprint was a display indicating the number of dice the player has accumulated. This enables players to judge whether to attempt a skill check or not based on their dice and the difficulty class of the check.
Following this I updated the fonts used in the game as well as the interaction icon.
A brief aside regarding fonts - the Cormorant font family handles numbers in a very odd way.
As shown above, some values hang below an imagined line while others creep above it. In terms of game UI, this means that displaying certain numbers makes them appear very off-center. This required a secondary font that's used purely for numbers. Above, in the re-roll prompt image, you'll see that this is troublesome for numerals that are in-line with other text. For the sake of expediency I skipped going to the trouble of using this secondary font for those numbers.
Gold Counter
Part of my UI quality improvements centered the player's gold counter. This functions as the player score and so I felt it would improve the player's experience if there were more visual feedback when it increased.
This code was surprisingly tricky, in both the sense that it took some thought to create and it involves a trick for it to work. In Unreal Engine 5.6, Widget Blueprints do not have access to timelines. I created a pseudo-timeline for the gold counter as well as the roll result to overcome this limitation. I also ensured that the gold counter could successfully be interrupted by new gold acquisition events and that the counter wouldn't take too long to complete ticking up. This is accomplished with a sequence node leading to a delay that has a maximum allowed tick time prior to firing the same interrupt that is used by new gold acquisition events.
Credits
"Cormorant" and "Brawler" fonts provided under the SIL Open Font License version 1.1, courtesy of Christian Thalmann and Cyreal, respectively.
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