Quick Tutorial: How to create a basic main menu screen in Unreal Engine

The first of our short tutorial series – we take a quick look at how to do simple things in Unreal, keeping it short and to the point.

Unreal knowledge unlocked:

  • Access the level blueprint
  • Display an interactable UI
  • Changing levels
  • Quitting the game

Create the UI

Create a UI Widget that contains a Play button and Quit button.

Example main menu widget

Create a Main Menu map

Under File -> New Level -> Basic. Make sure to SaveAs so you can decide where you want to save, and avoid potential engine crashes when trying to save normally.

Add a Camera Actor and set your desired view

In the Actor’s Panel in the Map view, search for CameraActor and add to the level. With the actor selected, you can change the position and angle to the desired view.

With the Camera selected, open the Level Blueprint, then right click to create a reference to the camera.

Note the level blueprint is not recommend to be used in instances where you need to access the nodes within as accessing them is difficult. Its fine in this situation, but others may be better served with Game Mode or an Actor blueprint.

Open level blueprint by clicking the World Blueprints button from the top of the Map UI.
Opening the level blueprint

Display the UI

In the level blueprint off EventBeginPlay, set up the following nodes:

Showing the following nodes connecting to each other: Event BeginPlay to Create Widget (Main Menu UI selected) to Add to Viewport (create widget return connected to target) to Set View Target with Blend (get Player Controller connected to Target; CameraActor connected to New View Target) to Set Show Mouse Cursor (toggled true; target connected to get player controller) to Set Input Mode UI Only (connected to Get player controller).
Connecting the nodes to display the UI on screen, make the mouse cursor visible and able to interact with the buttons.

Hook up the buttons

In this case, we set go to the Main Menu UI’s blueprint graph to connect the Start Game button to open the default first person map, and the Quit button to close the game.

The Following connections are show: On Clicked (Btn_Play) connects to Open Level (By Name) node. The Level Name is filled out to be FirstPersonMap. On Clicked (Btn_Quit) connects to Quit Game node.
Opening levels and quitting games on button click in the Main Menu widget’s graph.
Quick TutorialUnreal Engine 5
By Blueprints, Quick Tutorial, Unreal Engine