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 5. Top-Down Shooter

In this chapter we are going to create one of the most interesting and popular types of video game, especially on the mobile market: a top-down shooter. This kind of game is characterized by a fixed view from above the player, which shows the action around it from a top-down perspective.

This technique, also called bird's eye view or helicopter view, has being used in a lot of types of games such as role-playing game (RPG) (Final Fantasy series), action Grand Theft Auto (GTA), and Adventures (the Legend of Zelda), and lately it is being adopted in mobile games thanks to the possibility of creating a really interesting environment even with the typical limitations of the portable devices.

A top-down shooter gameplay is usually a frenetic action game, where the player needs to survive as long as they can as the continuous waves of enemies attack. The top-down perspective is perfect for those games. A player can see far around them, giving a perfect immersion into...