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)

Blueprint Function Library


Because there are plenty of objects on this game that can damage the player, it's useful to create a universal component that can be set into any of your objects in a few steps and that contains any kind of common function you need.

A Blueprint Function Library is exactly what we can use for this purpose: it's a collection of static functions that provide utility functionality not tied to a particular gameplay object. These libraries can be grouped into logical function sets.

We could put the function to kill the player into a library, and access this function on any object that has to kill the player when a particular condition rises. A ball, a spear, or a projectile are all different elements but all have one big purpose: kill the player.

Note

Actually, there's already an element that can be used (but not for our purpose): the Kill Z volume. This volume essentially destroys any Actor that enters (including the player) and is usually positioned at the very bottom...