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)

Killer objects


Let's add some dangerous objects for the player. The first one is an easier version of the KillZ volume. Create a new Blueprint extending an Actor and call it KillVolume. Add a box collision on the Viewport and extend its onActorBeginOverlap method with the KillPlayer function we created earlier as single node. You can understand the advantages of the function libraries now:

Duplicate this Blueprint and call it RollingBall. Change the collision box with a sphere and add a Sphere mesh with enabled physic. Those dangerous balls will be thrown down a hill ready to kill the player. Don't forget to choose OverlapOnlyPawn from the Collision Presets dropdown, unless you want that you player is killed by unwanted collisions:

Duplicate this item and call it Bullet. Make it smaller, remove the physic simulation, and add a Projectile component. Use the same settings we used in the previous chapters: Autoactivate, Initial Speed, max force of 2000, and 0 gravity. On the Event Graph, set...