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

Text Widget

The Text widget is one of the simpler widgets that exists. This is because it only allows you to display text information to the user and customize the visuals of this text. Almost every single game uses text in one way or another to display information to its players. Overwatch, for example, uses a text-based UI to display crucial match data to its players. Without the use of text, it would be very difficult – maybe even impossible – to convey key pieces of statistical data to the player, such as total damage dealt, total time playing the game, and many others.

The Text widget appears in the Palette tab within UMG. When you add a Text widget to the Canvas panel, it will display the text Text Block by default. You can customize this text by adding your text to the Text parameter of the widget. Alternatively, you can use Function Binding to display more robust text that can reference internal or external variables. Function Binding should be used whenever...