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)

Summary


As usual, here are some suggestions to improve this game:

  • GameOver? Yes, like the other chapter, it is missing a piece here also. This time it is the GameOver state of the player. Implement it by checking when a player reaches a value less than 0 on their health and managing this state with a Widget or simply restarting the game.

  • Buttons? Try to create a menu similar to the one in the previous chapter that handles the start/pause events.

  • New Weapons! Even if simple, the weapon class we created is really powerful; by using this class as parent, you can create dozens of new weapons without being worried to recreate the logic of fire/equip.

  • Different walking speed while shooting! Play with the CharacterMovement component and the start shoot event of the controller.

If you follow everything correctly, you can now play and enjoy a typical top-down shooter. In this chapter, I gave you all the basic aspects of this kind of game. By tweaking the variables and changing the mesh with better ones...