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

Cursor design and script for cursors


To interact with UI assets in UDK, the player needs to jump from targeting using the camera to clicking on menu items. This is done by gaining control of the XY screen space using a cursor. In this recipe, we'll provide a bare bones procedure for getting a simple cursor working while also giving an overview of how ActionScript and Kismet communicate. Note that at the time of writing UDK has only just implemented ActionScript 3 support for Scaleform. Also, now Scaleform 4 is out with more bells and whistles. Because this is only a recent development, all the lessons from here on in are written in ActionScript 2, which is still fully supported and an excellent starting point.

How to do it...

First, decide for yourself. Do you want a cursor that has a lot of thematic character or a cursor that is simple and clear? Usually, a simple cursor is less obtrusive than a highly decorative one.

Creating simple cursor art

  1. In Photoshop, create a 256x256 document. Click...