A first-person maze exploration game with a personal theme: collecting books of the Bible to progress through levels, with weather effects, fog, and trigger-based events.
This project is a first-person exploration game prototype built in Blueprints with Unreal Engine 4, developed following this Udemy course — notably, a Spanish-language course, reflecting the early stage of the learning journey before shifting to English-language resources. The development process was recorded in a full step-by-step playlist.
You can watch the complete development playlist here: YouTube Playlist
You can also watch a demo of the finished prototype here: YouTube
A Game with Personal Intent
Most prototypes in this series are technically motivated — they exist to learn a specific system or genre. This one is different: it has a personal theme. The game is a maze exploration where the collectibles are books of the Bible, and collecting all of them in each level unlocks the path to the next. The choice of theme gives the project an identity beyond its technical scope and makes it the only project in this series built around a specific personal context rather than a genre convention.
This kind of personal motivation matters in early game development. Learning a tool through a project you care about produces different engagement than learning it through a generic example. The investment in getting the game to feel right — the atmosphere, the progression, the sense of exploration — is higher when the theme has meaning beyond the technical.
Maze Design and Navigation
The maze is a first-person exploration space — corridors and rooms built from modular geometry that the player navigates without a map. The maze design for a collectible-based game has a specific constraint: every required collectible must be reachable, and the player must be able to determine that they’ve found all of them without needing external guidance.
This constraint shapes level design decisions. The maze can’t be so large that the player loses track of which areas they’ve visited. Visual landmarks — distinctive architecture, unique lighting in key rooms — help the player build a mental map of the space. The collectible UI counter showing current collected vs. total gives the player feedback on their progress without telling them where to go.
The progression gate — the exit unlocking only when all books are collected — creates the same tension as the gem collection in the First Person Platformer: the player must engage with the full space before advancing. In a maze context, this tension is higher because the space is deliberately disorienting.
Collectible System and UI
Each Bible book is a pickup actor with an overlap volume that triggers on player contact, increments a counter, plays a pickup effect, and destroys itself. The same pattern used in every collection mechanic across this series — but here carrying thematic weight, because the specific books collected have meaning beyond their function as game objects.
The UI displays the current collection state — books collected in the current level and the total required — giving the player constant visibility into their progress. The book names can be displayed in the UI as they’re collected, providing a record of what’s been found and a sense of narrative accumulation as the player gathers the canon.
The level progression — exit unlocking when all books are collected — uses a simple counter check: when the counter matches the level’s total, the exit trigger activates. The same pattern appears in the Survival Game, the First Person Platformer, and the 2D Action Platformer — it’s one of the most universally applicable game loop patterns.
Weather Effects: Rain, Snow, and Fog
The three atmospheric conditions — rain, snow, and fog — each apply to different areas or levels of the game, creating distinct environmental moods across the experience. These are early implementations of the weather systems later explored in much greater depth in the UE5 Weather System project — here implemented with simpler particle systems rather than the full Niagara stack.
Rain uses a particle emitter following the player — a continuous downward spray of particles that creates the visual and audio texture of rainfall. The key design consideration is that rain particles should interact with the ground — splash particles spawned on impact — to read as physical rather than cosmetic.
Snow uses slower, lighter particles with lateral drift, producing the characteristic soft descent of snowfall. Snow changes the emotional register of the environment — the same maze that reads as foreboding in rain reads as quiet and isolated in snow. Using different weather for different levels is a simple but effective way to distinguish them without changing the geometry.
Fog — implemented via Exponential Height Fog — limits the player’s view distance, which serves both an atmospheric and a gameplay function in a maze. Atmospherically, fog creates mystery and unease. Functionally, it prevents the player from seeing across the maze from high vantage points, maintaining the spatial mystery that makes exploration engaging.
Triggers and Level Events
The trigger system follows the same pattern as the SpaceShip game and the Suspense prototype — overlap volumes firing scripted events as the player moves through the space. In a maze exploration game, triggers are used for discovery moments: finding a collectible triggers ambient audio, entering a new area of the maze triggers an atmospheric event, collecting the final book triggers the exit sequence.
The trigger events contribute to the sense that the maze is a world rather than a geometry puzzle. When entering a new area triggers a subtle change in the ambient sound — wind picking up, a distant echo — the player perceives the space as having depth and history beyond what they can see.
Teaching the Development Process
The step-by-step playlist records the construction of this project from empty project to finished prototype. For this particular game, the teaching value extends beyond the technical: the playlist documents the process of building a game around a personal theme — how to translate an intention (a biblical exploration game) into game design decisions (what the collectibles are, how the progression works, what the atmosphere should feel like) and then into technical implementation.
This process — intention to design to implementation — is what distinguishes building a personal project from following a tutorial. The playlist makes that process visible and replicable for viewers who want to build their own themed projects.
Reflection
The Maze Biblical Game is the earliest project in this series with a clearly personal motivation — it’s built around something that matters beyond the technical exercise. That motivation is visible in the design decisions: the choice of atmosphere (exploration and discovery rather than action), the choice of collectibles (meaningful objects rather than generic tokens), the choice of weather (creating different emotional registers for different areas).
Looking back across the full series from this starting point, the progression is clear: from simple personal projects with personal themes, through technically focused course projects exploring specific systems, to complex architecture-driven C++ projects tackling multiplayer, GAS, and advanced UI. The personal motivation that drives this first batch of projects — building something that has meaning — is what sustains the learning arc through the more technically demanding work that follows.
Nicolás Bertoa 
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