Book Image

Unreal Engine Game Development Blueprints

By : Valcasara
Book Image

Unreal Engine Game Development Blueprints

By: 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 (9 chapters)

UMG


As mentioned in the previous chapters, UE4 has a very powerful tool that helps the users to create and handle all the UI elements of a game: Unreal Motion Graphic (UMG).

At the core of UMG are Widgets, which are a series of premade functions that can be used to construct your interface (buttons, checkboxes, sliders, progress bar, and so on). They can be edited in a specialized Widget Blueprint, which is divided into two tabs for construction: a Designer tab for the visual layout of the interface and a Graph tab that provides the functionality behind the Widget.

Widget Blueprint

The main tool when talking about UMG is the Widget Blueprint. Let's take a deeper look at it:

  • Menu bar: On top of it we find our familiar menu bar. It is the same menu bar that we can find in any Blueprint class.

  • Tool bar: This is a simplified version of the Blueprint class toolbar from where you can save, compile, and play your game.

  • Editor Mode: This is on the right-hand side of the toolbar and it switches the...