Game engines, such as Unreal Engine 4—as the tools that power the creation of the commercial games we love to play—are becoming increasingly accessible to both experienced and novice game developers outside of the traditional studio environment. Previous versions of Unreal Engine have powered many of the most popular console and PC games released over the last decade, and the newest version contains the tools for funneling this power into the hands of as many aspiring developers as possible. The most transformative of these tools is the Blueprints Visual Scripting system, which allows people who are not full-time programmers to create and implement the mechanics, interfaces, and interactions of a game.
Taking a step-by-step approach, this book will guide you through the process of using the visual nodes that make up Blueprint behavior, and link them together to create game mechanics, user interfaces, and more. In this process, you will be learning all the skills you need to get started with developing games in Unreal Engine 4 using Blueprints.
Starting with a basic first-person shooter template, each chapter will extend the prototype to create an increasingly complex and robust game experience. You will progress from creating basic shooting mechanics to gradually more complex systems that will generate user interface elements and intelligent enemy behavior. By focusing on universally applicable skills, the expertise you will develop in utilizing Blueprints can translate to other types of genres. By the time you finish this book, you will have a fully functional first-person shooter and the skills necessary to expand on the game to develop an entertaining, memorable experience for your players.
Chapter 1, Object Interaction with Blueprints, begins the book by covering how to bring new objects into a level to help build the world in which the game will be set. We move on to manipulating materials on objects, first through the object editor, and then by triggering during runtime via Blueprints.
Chapter 2, Enhancing Player Abilities, teaches you how to use Blueprints to generate new objects during gameplay, and link actions in Blueprints to player control inputs. You also learn to create Blueprints that allow objects to react to collisions with our generated projectiles.
Chapter 3, Creating Screen UI Elements, demonstrates setting up a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that will track the player's health, stamina, ammo, and current objective. Here, you learn how to set up a basic user interface using Unreal's GUI editor and how to use Blueprints to link the interface to the gameplay values.
Chapter 4, Creating Constraints and Gameplay Objectives, covers how to constrain the player's abilities, define the gameplay objectives for a level, and track those objectives via Blueprints that interact with the GUI elements created in the previous chapter. We walk through setting up collectible ammo packs that will refill the ammo of the player's gun, as well as utilizing the level Blueprint to define a win condition for our game.
Chapter 5, Making Moving Enemies with AI, is a crucial chapter that covers how to create an enemy zombie AI that will pursue the player around the level. We walk through setting up a navigation mesh on our level, and see how to use Blueprints to get enemies to traverse between patrol points.
Chapter 6, Upgrading the AI Enemies, shows how to create a compelling experience by modifying the zombie AI to have states in order to give the zombies a little more intelligence. In this chapter, we set up the patrol, searching, and attack states for the zombies using visual and auditory detection. Additionally, we explore how to make new enemies appear gradually, as the game is playing.
Chapter 7, Tracking Game States and Applying Finishing Touches, adds the finishing touches necessary to make our game a complete experience, before we finalize our game for release. In this chapter, we create rounds that will make the game increasingly difficult, game saves so that the player can save their progress and return, and player death to make the game's challenge meaningful.
Chapter 8, Building and Publishing, covers how to optimize graphics settings to get our game performing and looking at its best. Then, we explain how to create a sharable build of the game, and share some advice on how to continue progressing past the confines of this book on your way to becoming an accomplished game developer!
This book is an Unreal Engine 4-focused title, which means you only need a copy of Unreal Engine to get started. Unreal Engine 4 can be downloaded for free from https://www.unrealengine.com/, and comes with everything you need to follow along with the book. This book was made using version 4.7.6 of Unreal Engine 4, and as such, it does not account for features added or removed in subsequent versions of the software.
Whether you are brand new to game development or just unexposed to Unreal Engine 4's Blueprint Visual Scripting system, this is a great place to start learning how to build complex game mechanics quickly and easily without writing any text code. No programming experience required!
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "I named the project BlueprintScripting and stored it in the default Unreal Projects folder for OS X."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: " Now click on the Library tab, find the yellow Install button (as seen in the following screenshot), and click on it."
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