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)

The game


From the editor, create a new default map by going to File | New level and replacing the player start with our ThirdPersonCharacter.

The game will be divided into small section, each one with one or more elements of what we have learnt in this chapter.

Don't fall

In the first section, we use the kill volume. Here, the player must jump to some static platform without falling. Duplicate the original platform, set it lower than the original floor, add some cylinder shapes as a path and add the kill volume we created earlier between the platforms and the floor to recreate something similar to this:

Use your imagination to make the path you prefer and test it to find the more balanced way to do it (remember that a very easy game makes a gamer bored soon, but a very difficult game can be frustrating for even the most hardcore gamers).

Rolling stones

As second section, we use the killing balls: a long stair with lots of those balls rolling around. Search the stair BSP and position it after the...