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

DrawText and GameType concerns


In this recipe we will look at how to get the Draw Text and Draw Image Kismet nodes working. These are actions and events that allow you to float a string of text or a texture on the screen during the game. In maps using the GameType UTGame these do not yield any results. So if you want a game with these you have to set up your own game type. They work with the GameType SimpleGame, so if you can't follow the class set up, you can still do the Kismet part of this recipe to see how Draw Text and Draw Image can be used. Using a font asset from the Content Browser, we will simply fire off some text: "Walk to the Trigger please!" and when the trigger event fires, fire another: "You touched the Trigger!" and have a texture based graphic display on the screen too.

Getting ready

Ensure that you have copied the provided classes for MyGame to C:\UDK\~\Development\Src\MyGame\Classes\ and also allowed UDK to use MyGame by editing C:\UDK\~\UDKGame\Config\DefaultEngine...