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)

Summary


It is hard to explain all these concepts and at the same time, create a whole game without using lot of words and pages. I wish I had more space to show you more about particle systems and UI; however, at the same time, I hope you correctly understood all the steps of this chapter and are now able to create your own particle system, choosing between different modules and achieving the result that you have in your mind.

As usual, here is some homework for you:

  • Spot the missing behavior: You should notice that there is something missing when you play the game. We created the fuel variable and the code that handles it; however, we never actually implemented its usage in the game. The fix is pretty easy; check Flying Pawn, the nodes needed are an AND boolean and a branch.

  • More time: Instead of increasing the energy, try to change the behavior of the collectable item to add a little bit of time (or both energy and time) when one of them is collected.

  • A game over UI: Try to create a new...