Book Image

Elevating Game Experiences with Unreal Engine 5 - Second Edition

By : Gonçalo Marques, Devin Sherry, David Pereira, Hammad Fozi
Book Image

Elevating Game Experiences with Unreal Engine 5 - Second Edition

By: Gonçalo Marques, Devin Sherry, David Pereira, Hammad Fozi

Overview of this book

Immerse yourself in the Unreal game projects with this book, written by four highly experienced industry professionals with many years of combined experience with Unreal Engine. Elevating Game Experiences with Unreal Engine 5 will walk you through the latest version of Unreal Engine by helping you get hands-on with the game creation projects. The book starts with an introduction to the Unreal Editor and key concepts such as actors, blueprints, animations, inheritance, and player input. You'll then move on to the first of three projects, building a dodgeball game, where you'll learn the concepts of line traces, collisions, projectiles, user interface, and sound effects. You’ll also discover how to combine these concepts to showcase your new skills. The second project, a side-scroller game, will help you implement concepts such as animation blending, enemy AI, spawning objects, and collectibles. And finally, you'll cover the key concepts in creating a multiplayer environment as you work on the third project, an FPS game. By the end of this Unreal Engine book, you'll have a broad understanding of how to use the tools that the game engine provides to start building your own games.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)

Introducing timers

Given the nature of video games and the fact that they’re strongly event-based, every game development tool must have a way for you to cause a delay, or a wait time, before something happens. For instance, when you’re playing an online deathmatch game, where your character can die and then respawn, usually, the respawn event doesn’t happen the instant your character dies but a few seconds later. There is a multitude of scenarios where you want something to happen, but only after a certain amount of time. This will be the case for our EnemyCharacter, which will be throwing dodgeballs every few seconds. This delay, or wait time, can be achieved through timers.

A timer allows you to call a function after a certain amount of time. You can choose to loop that function call with an interval and also set a delay before the loop starts. If you want the timer to stop, you can also do that.

We will be using timers so that our enemy throws a dodgeball...