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

Working with images to skin a button


Since the UI components that come with Flash are not optimized to run in GFX, UDK users should not use those, and instead base their UI on the Scaleform Common Lightweight Interface Kit (CLIK ) components. This kit ships with UDK, and can be found in the folder C:\UDK\~\Development\Flash\CLIK\components. The end of the previous recipe details setting that up. However, those components are merely functional, and in most cases designers will want to adapt them, or 'skin' them, to their own taste. In this recipe this is what we'll do, using the standard Button component as an example because almost every game requires one at some point or another, and because its user interaction is amongst the first steps one usually takes when learning Flash too. A key point to note is that the 2D components in a CLIK object are converted by UDK at render time into 3D Draw Primitives , so in the artwork, there are several issues of control of these. For instance, drawing...