Bull Cow Game is my very first Unreal Engine project, built in Unreal 4 using C++ and Blueprints as part of a beginner course. The premise is deliberately simple: a console-based word guessing game where the target word is always an isogram — a word with no repeating letters — and the player has four lives to figure it out. Each guess is evaluated and scored as bulls (correct letter, correct position) and cows (correct letter, wrong position), giving the player incremental information to close in on the answer. No UI, no actors, no gameplay framework — just pure logic, string manipulation, and Unreal’s console output as the interface. The goal was to get comfortable with the engine’s C++ workflow and Blueprint integration from scratch.
Game Logic The core of the game is the bull and cow counting algorithm, which iterates over the player’s guess character by character and compares it against the hidden isogram. Because the target words are guaranteed to be isograms, the counting logic is simplified — there’s no need to handle duplicate letter edge cases, which makes it a clean first exercise in string traversal and game state management. The hidden word is selected from a predefined list of isograms, keeping the scope tight and the focus on the logic rather than content pipelines.
Life System The player starts with four lives and loses one for each incorrect guess — a guess that doesn’t match all bulls. The game tracks remaining lives and ends either when the player guesses the word correctly or exhausts all attempts. This gave a first concrete look at managing simple game state across multiple turns within a single session.
C++ and Blueprints Bridge The project uses C++ for the game logic — the isogram validation, the bull/cow scoring, and the life tracking — while Blueprints handle the flow that ties it together. This split was intentional as a learning exercise: understanding where C++ exposes functionality that Blueprints can then consume is one of the most fundamental patterns in Unreal development, and this project was the first hands-on contact with that boundary.
Nicolás Bertoa 
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