Book Image

Unreal Engine Game Development Blueprints

By : Nicola Valcasara
Book Image

Unreal Engine Game Development Blueprints

By: Nicola Valcasara

Overview of this book

With the arrival of Unreal Engine 4, a new wonderful tool was born: Blueprint. This visual scripting tool allows even non-programmers to develop the logic for their games, allowing almost anyone to create entire games without the need to write a single line of code. The range of features you can access with Blueprint script is pretty extensive, making it one of the foremost choices for many game developers. Unreal Engine Game Development Blueprints helps you unleash the real power of Unreal by helping you to create engaging and spectacular games. It will explain all the aspects of developing a game, focusing on visual scripting, and giving you all the information you need to create your own games. We start with an introductory chapter to help you move fluidly inside the Blueprint user interface, recognize its different components, and understand any already written Blueprint script. Following this, you will learn how to modify generated Blueprint classes to produce a single player tic-tac-toe game and personalize it. Next, you will learn how to create simple user interfaces, and how to extend Blueprints through code. This will help you make an informed decision between choosing Blueprint or code. You will then see the real power of Unreal unleashed as you create a beautiful scene with moving, AI controlled objects, particles, and lights. Then, you will learn how to create AI using a behavior tree and a global level Blueprint, how to modify the camera, and how to shoot custom bullets. Finally, you will create a complex game using Blueprintable components complete with a menu, power-up, dangerous objects, and different weapons.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Writing our Blueprints


Now, we need to add some logic to this project. In order to achieve the tic-tac-toe mechanics and develop speaking, we need to do the following:

  • Handle a turn-based mechanic

  • Know when someone wins

  • Show the state of the game

  • Store a winning counter for each player

  • Handle the restart

Turn-based mechanics

Open PuzzleBlock and PuzzleBlockGrid Blueprints as we are going to frequently switch between them.

First of all, we need to know which player has to move: the X or the O. In order to achieve this, also since this is a two-player game, we can use a simple Boolean variable that is stored on the PuzzleBlock grid class and grant it accessibility through the single block class.

Go to the grid class and add a new variable, call it IsX, and give its type as Boolean. From now, for our convenience, player 1 is always X and player 2 is O. Add Tooltip from the Details panel such as is player 1 and leave the other parameters as default:

Now, in order to check which player is playing from...