Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By : Thomas Mooney
Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By: Thomas Mooney

Overview of this book

UDK is a free, world class game editing tool and being so powerful it can be daunting to learn. This guide offers an excellent set of targeted recipes to help game artists get up to speed with game designing in UDK.Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook contains everything you need to jumpstart your game design efforts. The lessons are aimed squarely at the artist's field of production, with recipes on asset handling, creating content within the editor, animation and visual scripting to get the content working in gameplay.Unreal Game Development Kit Game Design Cookbook exposes how real-time environments are built using UDK tools. Key features are examined ñ assets, animation, light, materials, game controls, user interface, special effects, and game interactivity - with the view of making UDK technically accessible so users can transcend technique and focus on their creative design process. The book has well prepared recipes for level designers and artists of all levels. It covers core design tools and processes in the editor, particularly setting up characters, UI approaches, configuration and scripting gameplay. It is a technical guide that allows game artists to go beyond just creating assets, and it includes creative, extensive demonstrations that extend on mere functionality.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


UDK is a robust game editor that welds several different tools together; it offers many areas of specialization. New users should try to gain a broad understanding of the complete scope of what UDK includes, then start building individual prowess in areas that they care about. Whether you like to build things up or knock things down, you'll confront a base set of asset handling processes which deal with actors and game objects placed in the world, and the properties and interactions which we can assign to influence them. You'll also have to handle packages, which store content used to construct levels. The following lessons may seem at first difficult for those unfamiliar with UDK, but after a short while they'll become second nature. The examples here are intended to furnish anyone picking up UDK from scratch with some interface and asset handling awareness so they can then follow upcoming chapters.