This book is meant to help you going into the process of creating an iOS game from scratch using one of the best and oldest engines in the industry—Unreal® Engine 4.
Although the engine was made from the beginning to make AAA games for PC and console, it has recently acquired the market of casual and mobile games with lots of power and creative tools.
During the course of this book, we will go in depth into how to make several casual game types that look a lot like the top selling and profiting games on the App Store.
Chapter 1, Prepare to Make Unreal Games with Unreal® Engine – Installing and Setting Up, will take you through the process of preparing your environment to develop an iOS game using Unreal® Engine 4. At the end of the day, making an iOS game is completely different from making any other game, even if from other mobile devices.
Chapter 2, Methods and Tools to Create Your Games, discusses the different ways in which we can make a game using Epic's technology, what is the best, and why.
Chapter 3, Creating a Brick Breaking Game, contains the first game to be made in this book. Physics is one of the most important topics in any game engine, so in this chapter, will be making a game based on physics to understand how it works in Unreal® Engine.
Chapter 4, Advanced Game Content Generation with a Fruit Chopper Game, is the second game project in this book and will feature how to make a simple 3D game, which has more animations, effects, and complex swipe inputs.
Chapter 5, Building an Exciting Endless Runner Game, admits that the most famous genre in mobile games in the last few years was the endless runner games. So, we will be taking the ride of making a runner game with a randomly generated level.
Chapter 6, Designing an Advanced Game, tells you what a game is without enemies. All the past examples were based on scoring with some obstacles, but let's add some enemies in that chapter to interact with, in a simple touch-screen-friendly platformer game.
Chapter 7, Monetizing Your Game, will cover the easiest way to get profit from your free games. There are a few techniques that can be added to any mobile/iOS game to make it bring you money.
Chapter 8, iOS Debugging and Optimization, helps you understand why debugging is considered as a top priority when it comes to mobile devices, the pros of finding and fixing bugs, various debugging tools and techniques, and how to optimize performance.
Chapter 9, Publishing, will take you through the process of building and submitting the game to the store review because a game is not a game without an audience. This chapter is the final destination for any game release.
Appendix, Nodes Database, gives you a full database with explanation for each node we have used during the process of making all the four game examples. It will be helpful for you to start improvising and making your own unique games.
If you are looking for a book that teaches you the game design of a top selling iOS game, then this is the wrong book to read. If you are looking for a book to help you to prepare you art assets and make animations for your games, again this is the wrong book.
This book is mainly focused on the implantation of any art asset that you will use into the engine and how you can start putting everything together; building blueprints; gameplay logic; adding lots of fun, eye candy, and ear candy to the games; and building those games for testing and publishing on the App Store.
If you are a programmer who wants to switch to Unreal® Engine, or a programmer who is willing to learn the visual scripting, or even just a guy who wants to start making games; this is the correct place for you. The book is friendly with everyone who wants to make iOS games using Epic's technology regardless of their background.
You will need to have a Mac computer (windows PC is fine if you cannot provide a Mac). Also, you will need to have Unreal® Engine (I used 4.3.0 while writing the book), you will need to have XCode (5.1 or later, it depends on your Engine version), And finally a big cup of tea…
Also you need to have a base knowledge of the Mac OSX, as there will be some steps related to the OS itself, so you need to be a bit familiar with it.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
[default] exten => s,1,Dial(Zap/1|30) exten => s,2,Voicemail(u100) exten => s,102,Voicemail(b100) exten => i,1,Voicemail(s0)
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
[default]
exten => s,1,Dial(Zap/1|30)
exten => s,2,Voicemail(u100)
exten => s,102,Voicemail(b100)
exten => i,1,Voicemail(s0)Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
# cp /usr/src/asterisk-addons/configs/cdr_mysql.conf.sample /etc/asterisk/cdr_mysql.conf
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking on the Next button moves you to the next screen."
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