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

The Unreal Character Class

Before we talk about the Unreal Character class, let's briefly touch on the concept of inheritance. If you're used to working with C++ or another similar language, you should already be familiar with this concept. Inheritance is the process whereby a class derives characteristics and behavior from another class. A C++ class can be extended to create a new class – the derived class – that retains properties of the base class and allows for these properties to be modified, or for new characteristics to be added. An example of this is the Character class.

A Character class is a special type of pawn and is a descendant of the Unreal Pawn class. Extending upon the Pawn class, the Character class has some movement capabilities by default, along with some inputs that add movement to the character. As standard, the Character class gives users the ability to get a character to walk, run, jump, fly, and swim within the created world.

Since...