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

2D Blend Spaces

In Chapter 2, Working with Unreal Engine, we created a 1D Blend Space to blend between the movement states (idle, walk, and run) of a character based on the value of the Speed axis. For that specific example, it worked pretty well because you only needed one axis, but if we wanted the character to also be able to strafe, then we couldn't really do that.

To explore that case, Unreal Engine allows you to create 2D Blend Spaces. The concepts are almost exactly the same; the only difference is that you have an extra axis for animations, so you can blend between them not only horizontally, but also vertically.

Exercise 16.04: Creating a Movement 2D Blend Space

In this exercise, we're going to create a Blend Space that uses two axes instead of one. The vertical axis will be Speed, which will be between 0 and 800. The horizontal axis will be Direction, which represents the relative angle (-180 to 180) between the velocity and the rotation/forward vector...