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)

Gameplay


It is time to complete this project, merging together what we did so far and adding the gameplay scripts.

The game mechanic of the game expected:

  • A timer that goes down each second

  • An energy that is used by the player when accelerating the ship and a ship that can accelerate only if it has enough energy

  • A score that increases each time an item is collected

  • A game over that is shown when the player ends its time

  • The possibility to restart the game as many times as the player desires

  • Collectables that spawn periodically

For GameOver, we can create a third UI window that shows the score and the button of the main menu; however, let's keep it simple. We can connect a second event called GameOver on an HUD class BeginPlay event. This will be called by the PC when the game is over and it simply shows the menu together with the ingame UI. Not so pretty but fast and useful:

Prepare the needed references

In order to communicate between the player pawn and player controller, the easiest way is to set...