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)

Collectables


Create a new Blueprint class and call it BP_Collectable. We will use a sphere static mesh as a collectable in this game, we will add an aura around it for it to be easily localized by the player and add some fancy particles that go up in the aura.

First, simply add a Static Mesh in the components, set it to be a Sphere Mesh and replace it with the default root component. This will be the item that receives collisions by the player, therefore, set the collision of the mesh as OverlapAll. All the further components need to be set as NoCollision.

Add another Static Mesh to the root one, set it as Cylinder mesh and change its z scale to a higher number. This will be the aura of the object, therefore, it should surround the sphere, starting just under it and going up as much as it can.

Materials

We now create two materials for the sphere and the cylinder. The cylinder will be a simple translucent material, you can use the one that we used for the ghost or recreate another on your own...