Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Game Development Quick Start Guide

By : Rachel Cordone
Book Image

Unreal Engine 4 Game Development Quick Start Guide

By: Rachel Cordone

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine is a popular game engine used by developers for building high-end 2D and 3D games. This book is a practical guide designed to help you get started with Unreal Engine 4 and confidently develop interactive games. You’ll begin with a quick introduction to the Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) ecosystem. Next, you’ll learn how to create Blueprints and C++ code to define your game's functionality. As you progress, you’ll cover the core systems of UE4 such as Unreal Motion Graphics (UMG), Animation Blueprints, and behaviour trees to further build on your game development knowledge. The concluding chapters will then help you learn how to use replication to create multiplayer games. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with UE4 and have developed the skills you need to use the framework for developing and deploying robust and intuitive games.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Programming Using Blueprints

Now, we have the Unreal engine installed and you have familiarized yourself with its layout. We've set up our project, looked at how to customize it, and we have added extra content with the Animation Starter Pack. Now, it's time to learn about Blueprints.

Blueprints are a powerful alternative to traditional C++ programming. As I said in the previous chapter, it is possible to create an entire game using only Blueprints. In this chapter, we will start laying the foundation for our Awesome Game using Blueprints, and, in later chapters, we will expand on this game so we can learn how to use other Unreal Engine 4 systems.

The following points will be covered in this chapter:

  • Creating custom Blueprint classes and extending from Epic's base classes
  • Using variables and functions within Blueprint classes
  • Adding Components to a Blueprint class...