Around 2018 I decided I should get around to learning the Unreal Engine and absolutely fell in love with the tools they have available. The material editor was a big experience for me and really helped me to visualize of the processes going on when making shaders. I decided to make something simple and ended up trying to port my existing game BoxByte to it. Most of the time was spent creating this level select you can see in the video to the left.
I also learned a lot about blueprints, which has broken a longstanding bias against visual programming, which I had always seen as inferior. And while I still feel most comfortable inside a text editor, I can really appreciate the power of blueprints. All the logic within this level select is entirely created within blueprints.
Below is the material I used for the floating grid lines seen above.
Here is some of the levelSelector blueprints. This first one sets the view to focus on this selector when clicked and update the UI
This blueprint auto focuses on a designated levelSelector if the autoActivate boolean is true.
This next blueprint is part of the level_select PlayerController and moves the view to levels that have been clicked on.