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)

Chapter 4. UFO Run - Play with the Environment Effects

I hope you survived through the last chapter, maybe it was too complicating and confusing for some of you. As I promised, in this and the future chapters, we will not use any code, just the engine and its tools.

The aim of this chapter is to learn about the fundamental tools of the engine and the common elements that are used in video games and, following the style of the book, create an entire game using the tools that you just learned about. In this chapter, we will focus on the following important parts of a game:

  • Particle system and particle effects

  • Unreal Motion Graphic UI Designer (UMG)

  • UI Blueprint wizard

  • HUD

Before creating the game, let's introduce the two new main concepts of the game; the particle system and the UMG tools.