Book Image

Unreal Engine Virtual Reality Quick Start Guide

By : Jessica Plowman
Book Image

Unreal Engine Virtual Reality Quick Start Guide

By: Jessica Plowman

Overview of this book

With the ability to put players directly in the game, virtual reality gives users the chance to experience digital worlds directly. Nevertheless, many designers are unsure where to start when working with this amazing technology. With this book, you will learn user experience design processes and create immersive gameplay experiences designed for entertainment and player comfort. Using the power of Unreal Engine 4’s Blueprint visual scripting language, you will build player interaction and locomotion systems from scratch and use these flexible systems to create a sample game, as well as develop functional 2D and 3D user interfaces for players to interact with. And also learn the best practices for creating game art for virtual reality. Finally, you will learn how to test your application with your target audience and finalize your game for distribution. By the end of this book, you will have the knowledge to be able to make the leap from traditional game development to creating immersive virtual reality experiences using Unreal Engine 4.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Introducing our sample project – Server 17

To help frame our exploration of VR development with Unreal Engine 4, we will develop a game I like to call Server 17. Designed as a room-scale experience geared toward gamers who enjoy VR and skill-based games, Server 17 puts players in the shoes of a cyberpunk hacker in a dystopian future of corrupt governments and mega corporations. The player will have to unlock the secrets of a corporate server, which will be represented in game as a puzzle box. They will have access to a variety of tools and programs that will allow them to succeed before network security can catch them in the act and bring them down.

For this project, I have chosen to use Unreal Engine 4 with the HTC Vive. The Vive gives our players a nice, large room-space experience with excellent tracking of both the headset and the hand controllers. It also utilizes less USB ports on the computer. This is a great feature, since I am developing on a high-end laptop with limited ports. Though it does not have the finger tracking you may find with the Oculus Rift + Touch, it is an excellent piece of hardware that will meet the needs of this project.