Book Image

Learning Unreal Engine Game Development

By : Joanna Lee
Book Image

Learning Unreal Engine Game Development

By: Joanna Lee

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine 4 is a powerful game development engine that provides rich functionalities to create 2D and 3D games across multiple platforms. Many people know what a game is and they play games every day, but how many of them know how to create a game? Unreal Engine technology powers hundreds of games, and thousands of individuals have built careers and companies around skills developed using this engine. Learning Unreal Engine 4 Game Development starts with small, simple game ideas and playable projects that you can actually finish. The book first teaches you the basics of using Unreal Engine to create a simple game level. Then, you'll learn how to add details such as actors, animation, effects, and so on to the game. The complexity will increase over the chapters and the examples chosen will help you learn a wide variety of game development techniques. This book aims to equip you with the confidence and skills to design and build your own games using Unreal Engine 4. By the end of this book, you'll have learnt about the entire Unreal suite and know how to successfully create fun, simple games.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Learning Unreal Engine Game Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Unreal programming


The access to Unreal Engine's source code gives users the freedom to create almost about anything they can dream of. Functionalities of the base code can be extended and customized to create whatever the game needs to have. Learning how Unreal Engine works from the inside can unlock its full potential in game creation.

Unreal Engine has also incorporated very useful debugging features for the coding folks. One of them is the Hot Reload function. This tool enables changes in the C++ code to be reflected immediately in the game. To facilitate quick changes in code, Unreal Engine has also included Code View. By clicking on a function of an object in the Code View category, it shows you directly the relevant codes in Visual Studio where you could make code changes to the object.

Versioning and source control can be set up for game projects that include code changes.

Unreal objects

Actors are the base class of all gameplay objects in Unreal. For the Actors to have more properties and functionalities, the Actor class is extended to various more complex classes. In terms of programming, the Actor class acts as a container class to hold specialized objects called Components. The combination of the functionalities of the Components gives the Actor its unique properties.