Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By : Thomas Mooney
Book Image

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

By: Thomas Mooney

Overview of this book

UDK is a free, world class game editing tool and being so powerful it can be daunting to learn. This guide offers an excellent set of targeted recipes to help game artists get up to speed with game designing in UDK.Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook contains everything you need to jumpstart your game design efforts. The lessons are aimed squarely at the artist's field of production, with recipes on asset handling, creating content within the editor, animation and visual scripting to get the content working in gameplay.Unreal Game Development Kit Game Design Cookbook exposes how real-time environments are built using UDK tools. Key features are examined ñ assets, animation, light, materials, game controls, user interface, special effects, and game interactivity - with the view of making UDK technically accessible so users can transcend technique and focus on their creative design process. The book has well prepared recipes for level designers and artists of all levels. It covers core design tools and processes in the editor, particularly setting up characters, UI approaches, configuration and scripting gameplay. It is a technical guide that allows game artists to go beyond just creating assets, and it includes creative, extensive demonstrations that extend on mere functionality.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Setting yourself up to work with Scaleform


Scaleform does not require Adobe Flash, but that is the working environment for building UI content that is generally accepted and that Epic endorses through their documentation (http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Scaleform.html#Setting up Adobe Flash Environment). It is best to work with a later version such as CS5, but CS4 also works. ActionScript 2 is easier to use, but ActionScript 3 is also supported, with increasing documentation (although none of the examples in this book depend on it). Autodesk provides lessons on using Scaleform within UDK: http://gameware.autodesk.com/scaleform/support/documentation.

Getting ready

This recipe assumes you already have Adobe Flash CS5 working. If you don't have it, and don't want to own it, you could try one of several free routes (such as using Vectorian Giotto and FlashDevelop).

How to do it...

Setting up Scaleform in Flash

  1. In Flash, open a new .FLA, set to ActionScript2. In the menu Help | Manage Extensions click...