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)

Inventory system


Let's now use some Blueprint Widget to create the user interface and the inventory system. We will need three classes: a main GameUI, Inventory Button, and Inventory Craft Button.

The main GameUI is what the player will see. It will contain a grid of objects (the actual inventory), a panel that shows the information of the selected item, and a cookbook that contains all the items that are available to be crafted.

The Inventory Button is the single button of our inventory and will be just a single squared button with an image over it.

The Inventory Craft Button is similar to the other button, but it also contains the name of the item that will be crafted and the items needed to the player to craft it.

The inventory button

Create a Blueprint Widget and call it InventoryButton. This object (and all the Widget that will be added into Canvas Panel dynamically) doesn't need a main canvas. The aspect (size, anchor, position, and so on) will be determined directly within the panel where...