Unreal Advent of Code

Advent of Code is a yearly coding challenge that happens in December. A coding puzzle (typically centered around elves or Santa) is revealed every day until Christmas. It’s a great way to brush up on old languages or learn new ones, and in 2022 I used it to stay sharp with C++ and Unreal. My self-imposed restriction was that I had to visually represent the “solving” of the puzzles in real-time using the engine.

Here are a few excerpts

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This puzzle involved calculating how a series of Rock Paper Scissors games would play out, given a predetermined strategy guide. The guide was a list of letter pairs like [A Y] [B X] [C Z] with letters corresponding to which shape each player would choose. The solution was calculated using a score based on game outcome and shape chosen.

Each sphere is a game played: sphere material represents what was "thrown" that game, and container it spawns above represents that game's outcome

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This puzzle involved finding matching “items” in sections of an “elf’s rucksack.” A rucksack was represented as a series of item characters like vJrwpWtwJgWrhcsFMMfFFhFp. Each matching item was scored based on its ASCII value, then summed for the solution.

Each group of letters is a rucksack: red letters represent a match within the rucksack, and blue letters represent a match among a set of 3 concurrent rucksacks

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This puzzle involved finding the “elf” with the highest calorie count among their snacks. Snack calorie counts were represented in a list with separators dividing each elf. Individual elf counts were summed, then solved for the max.

Each cube is an elf's calorie count: cube size is scaled based on calories, with yellow cubes spawning anytime a new max calorie count is found.