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)

Matinee


The ability to create cinematic sequences or even dynamic elements within the engine is covered by the Matinee animation tool. This system allows you to manipulate the properties of an object over time and its framework is based on keyframes (like any animation or video editing software such as Flash, Maya, and so on) where each key positioned within its timeline represent a value of an Actor in the level:

Let's take a look at the interface:

  • Menu bar: At the very top, we find the menu bar. From here, you can import/export the Matinee or part of it, manipulate keys and sections, toggle and customize the viewport.

  • Toolbar: From this toolbar, you can find buttons to preview the Matinee (such as play, loop, reverse, or playback speed) and buttons to navigate through the sequence.

  • Curve Editor: This editor allows you to graphically visualize and edit the animations curves used by the tracks in the sequencer. Tracks that have animation curves that can be edited in the Curve Editor in Matinee...