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

Creating a steamy plume in Cascade


The goal of this chapter has been to overview a broad spectrum of the UDK content generation tools, so now we jump to a new area, particle effects. In the first chapter we created an asset which was an empty particle system, aiming to show how its package would be created and saved, but having left it at that it would be good to flesh it out. So we'll look a little deeper into Cascade and create a steamy plume which can be applied in a scene as a set dressing. This recipe is a quick guide to the essentials. We will deal with advanced Cascade challenges in Chapter 7, Hi, I'm Eye Candy!

How to do it...

  1. Create a Blank Map and, in the Content Browser, select your package folder. If you haven't created one, just click on New Packages. You'll be prompted for a package save location later. Right-click in the assets panel and choose New Particle System. Make the Group name of the Particle System Cascade and the asset name SmokePlume. The Unreal Cascade Editor will...