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


Formerly, UI implementation was done in UDK using UIScenes , a part of the Canvas tool. These were internally integrated in the editor but in some ways limited (although it is possibly a shame UIScenes were deprecated completely). Scaleform Corporation, just before it was acquired by Autodesk, paired up with Epic Games to allow Flash based .SWF content to be imported into UDK. This allows designers access to the timeline-based, vector-based graphic animation Flash permits, and also access to ActionScript commands that drive cursors, button rollovers, clicking actions, and user input. Additionally, adding the Scaleform GFx Media Player extension within Flash provides a way for designers to preview how the UI content will look in game directly as they work, since they don't have to export, compile and build their game, and so forth.

The overall design process incorporating Scaleform for UI is to come up with a plan for the UI features, then do the art (or at least placeholder art...