Book Image

Mastering Game Development with Unreal Engine 4 - Second Edition

By : Matt Edmonds
Book Image

Mastering Game Development with Unreal Engine 4 - Second Edition

By: Matt Edmonds

Overview of this book

<p>To make a basic combat game from scratch, you will quickly override existing UE4 classes, and add and implement simple C++ functions while running and building them. These are all discussed as a short summary for new developers and as a quick refresher for experienced developers. Next, you will build a combat player character with expanded controls, create logic for a character, swap weapons, attack and move, bridge over scene changes and transitions, retain data between scenes, and manage the scene-change process. </p><p>You will then build an intelligent enemy AI and add physics based particles for weapon impacts. You will also get acquainted with cutting-edge features such as Volumetric Lightmaps for precomputed lighting, and Atmospheric and Volumetric Fog, to build advanced visuals in our ongoing GitHub project. </p><p>Moving on, you will explore the tools required to build an in-game cut-scene for a more professional gameplay experience and story direction. </p><p>Along the way, you will implement a solid game UI, including writing a full in-game load and save system that will enable players to resume their game from any point. You will also prepare, build, and work on VR and AR taking them from editor to real-world, building two new projects one in each of these brand new areas of UE4 and integrate classes from the main project into AR! </p><p>By the end of the book, you will have mastered all major UE features and will be able to bring self-imagined games to life through Unreal Engine 4.18+.</p>
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

More polished combat – spawn points, hit reactions, and dying

So now we have an AI that likes to chase down our player and try to hurt them, great. But at this stage, our player can do almost no interaction with that enemy. We'll want to make things a bit more professional by spawning the enemies from a spawn point actor rather than placing them directly in the level (so we can spawn multiple enemies, wait until they are triggered, and so on), have them react when they're shot (which should not interrupt their other activities, but simply layer on top of them with a blended animation), and of course, be able to kill them (and have all of this reflected when loading/saving).

Spawn points for enemy placement

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