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

Introduction

In the previous chapter, we created our C++ class that inherits from the Character class and added all the necessary Actor components to be able to see the game from that character's perspective, as well as being able to see the character itself. We then created a Blueprint class that inherits from that C++ class, in order to visually set up all its necessary components. We also learned briefly about Action and Axis Mappings.

In this chapter, we will be going more in-depth on these topics, as well as covering their C++ usage. We will learn about how player input works in UE4, how the engine handles input events (key presses and releases), and how we can use them to control logic in our game.

Let's start this chapter by getting to know how UE4 abstracts the keys pressed by the player to make it easier for you to be notified of those events.

Note

In this chapter, we will be using an alternative version of the Character blueprint we created, called...