Book Image

Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine 5 - Third Edition

By : Marcos Romero, Brenden Sewell
5 (1)
Book Image

Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine 5 - Third Edition

5 (1)
By: Marcos Romero, Brenden Sewell

Overview of this book

Unreal Engine's Blueprint visual scripting system enables designers to script their games and programmers to create base elements that can be extended by designers. With this book, you'll explore all the features of the Blueprint Editor, along with expert tips, shortcuts, and best practices. The book guides you through using variables, macros, and functions, and helps you learn about object-oriented programming (OOP). You'll discover the Gameplay Framework and advance to learning how Blueprint Communication allows one Blueprint to access information from another Blueprint. Later chapters focus on building a fully functional game step by step. You'll start with a basic first-person shooter (FPS) template, and each chapter will build on the prototype to create an increasingly complex and robust game experience. You'll then progress from creating basic shooting mechanics to more complex systems such as user interface elements and intelligent enemy behavior. The book demonstrates how to use arrays, maps, enums, and vector operations and introduces the elements needed for VR game development. In the final chapters, you’ll learn how to implement procedural generation and create a product configurator. By the end of this book, you'll have learned how to build a fully functional game and have the skills required to develop an entertaining experience for your audience.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
1
Part 1: Blueprint Fundamentals
6
Part 2: Developing a Game
11
Part 3: Enhancing the Game
16
Part 4: Advanced Blueprints
21
Part 5: Extra Tools

Chapter 9: Building Smart Enemies with Artificial Intelligence

In this chapter, we'll add another challenge to our gameplay by making enemies that pose a threat to our player. To do so, we'll leave behind our target cylinders in favor of enemies that have AI behavior. We want to set up enemies that have the potential to pose a threat to the player and can analyze the world around them to make decisions. To accomplish this, we are going to learn about Unreal Engine's built-in tools for handling AI behavior and how those tools interact with our Blueprint scripting. In the process, we will cover these topics:

  • Setting up the enemy actor to navigate
  • Creating navigation behavior
  • Making the AI chase the player

By the end of the chapter, we will be able to create a Behavior Tree that handles enemy navigation in the level and make them chase the player when they are in their line of sight.