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)

The game


As usual, after a brief theoretical introduction, let's use what I explained and create a game. For this project we use the TopDown Blueprint template, but we also need some external assets.

UE4 recognises a vast amount of files extensions, from .fbx for a 3D object (almost any 3D software can create an FBX asset file either from an internal exporter or external plugin) to the .wav audio file, from the .bmp texture to the .wmv video file created by an online tool.

For this game, we need a bunch of animations contained in the Unreal Animation Starter Pack and a couple of weapon 3D models. If you are an artist you can use your own models, but my advice is to use the files suggested here for 100 percent compatibility with what I'm going to teach you.

The Animation Starter Pack is a free package released by the Epic team and it can be found directly from the MARKETPLACE section of the launcher at https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace:

This package is compatible with the mannequin used...