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)

The code


We are done with the editor, for now. It is time to open our Visual Studio project and add the logic of the game.

C++ code in UE4 is called assisted C++, meaning that there are a lot of features and conventions that help people to write fully working classes in minutes, even without code experience.

Open the Visual Studio project by double-clicking the .sln file in the root folder of the project or navigate to File | Open Visual Studio from the editor.

You will see that some files are already present in Solution Explorer. Let's take a look at these files:

First, you will notice that there are two projects in your solution. The first one is the whole engine source code. You will usually never touch it as it is easy to make a mistake owing to the complexity of the engine, and you should not change anything in it unless you are an expert. Also, there is a whole company that is updating that code frequently, improving it at least once a month.

The second project is our game. The root folder...