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)

Door trigger volume


Another common element of a game are blocking objects such as doors that block the passage of the player until a condition (which can be a button press, solving a puzzle, or simply going near the player) is raised.

There are two ways to create a door Actor. The first one is using Matinee and Level Blueprint, and it is easier to create but the Actor cannot be replicated. Good if you have only a few doors in your level or if the door itself contains more than one element that needs to be animated.

If you expect to have several doors on your level and their movement is a simple translation, you could create them within a Blueprint class and a timeline.

Let's see both of these methods. There is no right one: it depends on your project and the environment required.

Doors within Matinee

Inside your level, using box meshes, create a wall with a hole and fit the hole with a door (in this case, another simple cube):

Create a Matinee exactly how we did earlier, with a single movement...