Chapter 1, Preparing for a Big Project, shows how to create a new project, set it up, edit its settings and making it ready to rock. Also, the advanced assets pipeline will be discussed so that readers can bring in their models into Unreal Engine.

Chapter 2, Setting Up Your Warrior, explains how to make the game's hero! We will be building a character controller mapped to the keyboard and mouse using C++. You will learn how to create the logic for the character, switch weapons, attack, and move with C++. The class will be converted to blueprints. You will learn how to add in animations and physics to make it move using C++.

Chapter 3, Designing Your Playground, shows how to build the game world! We will be using the editor tools and brushes to build a level, apply lighting and materials to it, and make it ready for the first round of testing the game's logic.

Chapter 4, The Road to Thinkable AI, shows how to build the game's creatures AI, which are going to detect the player and attack them based on distance, sight, and/or the noise made by the player. All scripting will be done in C++. Animations will be taken care of by the editor and some other cool options.

Chapter 5, Adding Collectables, spices things up with some collectables! We will learn about some of the triggering and overlapping events, more about adding new classes, and adding some physics to the collectable items.

Chapter 6, The Magic of Particles, shows how to add in some particles to complete the coolness! We use cascade to build particles for the enemies, weapons, and collectables, and learn to tie these to the game logic.

Chapter 7, Enhancing the Visual Quality, shows how to make the game better looking by focusing on the most important rendering features of the engine, to make things pretty. You will learn to bake light maps.

Chapter 8, Cinematics and In-Game Cutscenes, covers the tools required to build an in-game cut-scene for a better gameplay experience and story direction.

Chapter 9, Implementing the Game UI, shows how to add a solid UI to the game is what will get the players going "Hell Yeah!" Make use of Unreal Motion Graphics (UMG) to tinker with different screen sizes and build a superb looking UI for your game.

Chapter 10, Save the Game Progress, shows how to write a "save and load" function in order to save the progress in order to be able to resume the game later.

Chapter 11, Controlling Gameplay via Data Tables, shows how to use data tables to drive the gameplay values for the enemies and so on (it is widely used in tons of game genres, such as Tower Defense, RPG, Roguelike, RTS and so on)

Chapter 12, Ear Candy, shows how to add audio experience to the gameplay. You will learn how to cue the audio and use the clips in the scenes.

Chapter 13, Profiling the Game Performance, masters the various editor debugging and profiling tools to define the performance issues.

Chapter 14, Packaging the Game, you will learn how to make an executable of the game for release. We also add a splash screen to show you're the boss, cook the game, and then use the project launcher to release it.

In order to be able to follow along with this book, you need to have a good foundation of C++, as the book mostly focuses on building an Unreal game using C++. You also need to have Unreal Engine installed and Visual Studio, and both be available for free.

If you are on a Mac or Linux, you'll definitely need another IDE to use with Unreal Engine, as Visual Studio is not supported on those platforms, but you'll still be able to go with the book smoothly.

Good game design and level design skills are great and will help, but they are not essential!

This book is for game developers who have basic knowledge of Unreal Engine and also have basic C++ scripting knowledge. This is ideal for those who want to take the leap from a casual game developer to a full-fledged professional game developer with Unreal Engine 4.

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: "The game we are going to create during the course of this book is called Bellz."

A block of code is set as follows:

UCLASS(config = Game)
class AGladiator : public ACharacter
{
  GENERATED_BODY()

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: "Otherwise inside the launcher, just hit the Launch button of the editor version you want."

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