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)

Fake platform corridor


Let's create a corridor using some destructible mesh we discussed before. The idea is to create a long corridor composed of a lot of tiles where some of them are fake and will break as soon as the player steps on them.

The easiest way is to create a simple tile mesh, create a destructible one from it, and position the single tiles one by one inside the level. We want to be smarter than this and use Blueprint to our advantage.

We will create a Blueprint class that contains a single row of static tiles and as soon as the game starts, swap a random tile with destructible ones.

Using BSP brushes, create a tile frame of 200 x 200 x 20 with a hole of 180 x 180 and a plain tile of 180 x 180 x 20 like this (I used the material M_Plains_Floor_Block):

We create the tile in this way for a practical reason. When a destructible mesh is destroyed, it sends a force signal around its corner, and without a border, this signal inevitabily touch the other destructible meshes, starting an...