A few months ago I did something like this in the Godot Editor, so I thought about doing something similar in Unreal. You can grind along Blueprint wires, fight a hydra in the Material Editor, and play Tetris in the Size Map. There’s also a slime that eats the Content Browser.
Under the hood, the game is a Slate widget in the main window’s overlay slot.
- Each frame it walks the window’s widget tree, finds visible docked tab stack, and turns its on-screen rectangle into level geometry. The level follows the layout as you resize panels or open and close them.
- During runtime, an input processor grabs the keyboard before the editor sees it. Pressing Space doesn’t type into a text box.
- The gameplay goes through the editor’s own systems (ex. ground pounding a blueprint node executes it).
- Each scene takes over a different part of the editor.
Making the editor behave like a game taught me plenty about its internals.