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)

Collectables and items


I know, we saw this element more than one time in this book but, hey, this is a very common element in a lot of games.

In a survival world, you must be able to interact with most of the elements around you. You want to collect stones, wood, grass, or fruits and be able to craft your tools, such as axes to cut the trees. You would also want weapons to hunt your food in order to survive in the hostile environment.

In this section, we will create an inventory system for the objects that can be collected in the world: we will use a new element (structure) that handles the properties of our items. We improve our knowledge of Blueprint wizard to populate a useful and dynamic user interface, and we will see how useful Blueprint Interfaces and superclasses are when talking about a vast number of different interactive objects and a crafting system.

Blueprint structures

A Blueprint structure is exactly like a structure of an object-oriented programming language: a special variable...