Welcome back to another Cowzy Friday update! This week, I've been working on the Toolbar UI (Kevin, Rene, if you're reading this, I did the ooo shiny thing and have no regrets), setting up the groundwork for the city building side of The Cowzy Game. Let's see about how I made the UI buttons dynamic, the animation for them, and what's next!
New Toolbar UI
To give players the ability to have build options, I've added a Toolbar UI with three buttons:
🏗️ Build Mode – Activates build mode, allowing players to place a house. While this is currently limited to houses, the system will be expanded more in the future!
🛤️ Path Mode – This button is recognized by the system but currently doesn’t trigger any functionality. The goal is for it to allow players to define and lay down paths for their town in a future update.
💰 Gold Bar Button – A placeholder for now to demonstrate the animation and input is working as intended.
Dynamic Button Creation in Unreal Engine 5
One of the biggest improvements this week was learning how to create dynamic buttons in Unreal Engine 5. Initially, our Build Mode button was a simple hardcoded element, meaning each new button would have required redundant setup and logic.
Now, our Toolbar UI buttons are their own BP Widget. When a new button is created in our HUD, it automatically inherits animations, styles, and interactions without extra manual setup. This keeps things modular and scalable, making future UI updates much easier.
This approach will be critical as we expand the Toolbar UI to include additional features like villager management, resource tracking, and more.
What’s Next?
Now that we have the basics of the Toolbar UI, the next step is making a component so we can better manage which Toolbar option is selected.
Have a secondary piece of UI for building, so we can select which building we want to build.
Diving into the Townsfolk AI so they can actually build the buildings!!
This update marks another step toward a smoother and more intuitive Cowzy experience. Stay tuned for more improvements next week!
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