We’re doing a version of the Unreal tutorial on menus taken from here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/UMG/QuickStart/3/index.html

The intro menu to a game is actually a separate level in itself.

Here is what our demo menu looks like in the viewport. There are a few things to notice: I added just Atmospheric Fog to the scene to give the menu something in the background. Also in world settings I overrode the normal game mode and set the default pawn class to a blank “Character” instead of “ThirdPersonCharacter.” This is so when we “play” this level, there’s no character running around. You can see my file structure below in the content browser. I also added a font.

Here is what the menu looks like in UMG. It’s a bit chaotic but the instructions are hidden when we start the menu. Notice with the buttons, in the options on the bottom right, I created an OnClicked event. Another important thing to notice is in the details panel on the upper right part of the screen, I titled the button and also “Is Variable” is checked. That is checked by default with the buttons but I also checked it for the title text so I could hide it in my graph. (Of course while you’re working you don’t have to have it look like this. You can turn things off by clicking the eye icon to the right of the name)

Now here is the graph for the menu. Those events got created when I turned them on in the Designer options. Pretty simple logic. On startup, I hide the instructions and the back button. When we hit play, level_1 opens, when we click “how-to” everything is hidden and then the instructions and the back button are showing. When the back button is pressed we reverse that and hide the instructions and back button and show everything else. The quit button just does a console command to quit the game. Notice I also have a “title” variable. I made this by selecting the text of my title (Alien Afterlife) and in the upper right of the details panel I gave the text a title and clicked on “Is Variable.” This allowed me to get it in the graph so I could hide it.

Once you’re done making the widget menu, you can turn it on in the Level Blueprint on Event BeginPlay. Notice I also had to turn on the mouse cursor by pulling up the Player Controller.

Lastly, let’s look briefly at our Project Settings. This is found in Edit —> Project Settings. This is where we can tell the game that we want to start with the menu first. We’ll look a lot more at Project Settings later as there are a few things to set up before you do a build.