Book Image

Game Development Projects with Unreal Engine

By : Hammad Fozi, Gonçalo Marques, David Pereira, Devin Sherry
Book Image

Game Development Projects with Unreal Engine

By: Hammad Fozi, Gonçalo Marques, David Pereira, Devin Sherry

Overview of this book

Game development can be both a creatively fulfilling hobby and a full-time career path. It's also an exciting way to improve your C++ skills and apply them in engaging and challenging projects. Game Development Projects with Unreal Engine starts with the basic skills you'll need to get started as a game developer. The fundamentals of game design will be explained clearly and demonstrated practically with realistic exercises. You’ll then apply what you’ve learned with challenging activities. The book starts with an introduction to the Unreal Editor and key concepts such as actors, blueprints, animations, inheritance, and player input. You'll then move on to the first of three projects: building a dodgeball game. In this project, you'll explore line traces, collisions, projectiles, user interface, and sound effects, combining these concepts to showcase your new skills. You'll then move on to the second project; a side-scroller game, where you'll implement concepts including animation blending, enemy AI, spawning objects, and collectibles. The final project is an FPS game, where you will cover the key concepts behind creating a multiplayer environment. By the end of this Unreal Engine 4 game development book, you'll have the confidence and knowledge to get started on your own creative UE4 projects and bring your ideas to life.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Preface

Game World and Spawning Objects

When it comes to spawning objects into the game world, it is actually the World object that represents your level that handles the creation of said objects. You can think of the UWorld class object as the single, top-level object that represents your level.

The UWorld class can do many things, such as spawning and removing objects from the world, detect when levels are being changed or streamed in/out, and even perform line traces to assist with inter-object detection. For the sake of this chapter, we'll focus on spawning objects.

The UWorld class has multiple variations of the SpawnActor() function, depending on how you want to spawn the object, or by which parameters you have access to in the context in which you are spawning this object. The three consistent parameters to take into consideration are the following:

  • UClass: The UClass parameter is simply the class of the object that you want to spawn in.
  • FActorSpawnParameters...