Book Image

Unreal Engine Game Development Blueprints

By : Nicola Valcasara
Book Image

Unreal Engine Game Development Blueprints

By: Nicola Valcasara

Overview of this book

With the arrival of Unreal Engine 4, a new wonderful tool was born: Blueprint. This visual scripting tool allows even non-programmers to develop the logic for their games, allowing almost anyone to create entire games without the need to write a single line of code. The range of features you can access with Blueprint script is pretty extensive, making it one of the foremost choices for many game developers. Unreal Engine Game Development Blueprints helps you unleash the real power of Unreal by helping you to create engaging and spectacular games. It will explain all the aspects of developing a game, focusing on visual scripting, and giving you all the information you need to create your own games. We start with an introductory chapter to help you move fluidly inside the Blueprint user interface, recognize its different components, and understand any already written Blueprint script. Following this, you will learn how to modify generated Blueprint classes to produce a single player tic-tac-toe game and personalize it. Next, you will learn how to create simple user interfaces, and how to extend Blueprints through code. This will help you make an informed decision between choosing Blueprint or code. You will then see the real power of Unreal unleashed as you create a beautiful scene with moving, AI controlled objects, particles, and lights. Then, you will learn how to create AI using a behavior tree and a global level Blueprint, how to modify the camera, and how to shoot custom bullets. Finally, you will create a complex game using Blueprintable components complete with a menu, power-up, dangerous objects, and different weapons.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Preparing the game


As a game for this project, we are going to recreate the famous PAC-MAN. This is a simple game that can introduce us to some important behaviors in a game: collisions, movements, collectables, and enemies!

PAC-MAN, for those of you who don't know this game, is probably the most famous arcade game of all time. Released on 1980 and developed by Namco, it is recognized as being the longest running video game franchises from the golden age of arcade video games:

The game is quite simple: the player guides PAC-MAN through a maze, eating the dots along his path. When all the the dots are eaten, PAC-MAN is taken to the next stage. There are four threats that roam the maze trying to catch PAC-MAN. If an enemy comes in contact with PAC-MAN, PAC-MAN dies and the player loses a life, only to respawn after a brief period of time on his respawn point. Enemies can be eaten by PAC-MAN, thanks to some power-ups that are positioned around the map.

We are going to create this game in 3D, using...