Book Image

Unreal Engine 5 Game Development with C++ Scripting

By : ZHENYU GEORGE LI
Book Image

Unreal Engine 5 Game Development with C++ Scripting

By: ZHENYU GEORGE LI

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine is one of the most popular and accessible game engines in the industry, creating multiple job opportunities. Owing to C++ scripting's high performance, advanced algorithms, and engineering maintenance, it has become the industry standard for developing commercial games. However, C++ scripting can be overwhelming for anyone without a programming background. Unreal Engine 5 Game Development with C++ Scripting will help you master C++ and get a head start on your game development journey. You’ll start by creating an Unreal Engine C++ project from the shooter template and then move on to building the C++ project and the C++ code inside the Visual Studio editor. You’ll be introduced to the fundamental C++ syntax and essential object-oriented programming concepts. For a holistic understanding of game development, you’ll also uncover various aspects of the game, including character creation, player input and character control, gameplay, collision detection, UI, networking, and packaging a completed multiplayer game. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-equipped to create professional, high-quality games using Unreal Engine 5 with C++, and will have built a solid foundation for more advanced C++ programming and game development technologies.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Getting Started with Unreal C++ Scripting
6
Part 2 – C++ Scripting for Unreal Engine
12
Part 3: Making a Complete Multiplayer Game

Creating the enemy character

Creating the enemy character is similar to creating the player character. First, we create the AEnemy class, which inherits from ACharacter. Second, we create the BP_Enemy blueprint, with AEnemy as the parent class. Third, we create the ABP_Enemy animation blueprint, which is identical to ABP_PlayerAvatar.

The main difference between the enemy and player characters is the controller. The EnemyController class inherits from the engine’s AIController and will make decisions to move to the target and attack.

The enemy will share the hero’s model and animations, so to distinguish between the two, enemy models will use a gray material, which puts all the enemies in gray (see Figure 7.5):

Figure 7.5 – The hero versus an enemy

Figure 7.5 – The hero versus an enemy

Before we start, we want to clarify that we will apply some iterative processes in the development of the game. While creating the enemy character, we will copy some code and borrow...