The Unreal Development Kit (UDK), the free version of Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3, is truly a sight to behold.

There are plenty of tutorials available on creating specific things in games, but in my experience there have been very little in terms of explaining how games are created in the actual game industry. In this book, I plan to expose those processes while creating a game from scratch using the Unreal Development Kit, including things that most tutorials leave out, such as creating menus, custom GUI, and publishing your game.

The game that we will be creating will be a basic third-person shooter / Tower Defense hybrid game using the default UDK assets. Tower Defense games have been quite popular on game sites, and we will be creating gameplay similar to that found in the popular titles Monday Night Combat and Dungeon Defenders, both of which were created using Unreal.

In this chapter, we will be creating the first playable version of our game. It will be split into five tasks. It will be a simple step-by-step process from beginning to end. Here is the outline of our tasks:

We will first approach the project using nothing but the UDK Editor and Kismet.