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

Artificial intelligence


AI is a decision-making process that adds NPCs in a game. AI is a programmable decision-making process for NPCs to govern their responses and behaviors in a game. A game character that is not controlled by a human player has no form of intelligence, and when these characters need to have a higher form of decision-making process, we apply AI to them.

AI in games has progressed tremendously over the years and NPCs can be programmed to behave in a certain way, sometimes, with some form of randomness, making it almost unpredictable so that players do not have a simple, straightforward strategy to win the level.

The decision-making process, which is also the logic of the NPCs, is stored in a data structure known as a Behavior Tree. We will first learn how to design a simple Behavior Tree then learn how to implement this in Unreal Engine 4.

Understanding a Behavior Tree

Learning how to design a good decision-making tree is very important. This is the foundation on which programmers...