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

Introduction


When you consider game character animation, it's normal to ask how to import external animation content into the Game Editor, and how to make it work during gameplay. This is going to be our starting point. It's assumed if you are dealing with this chapter that you already know how to animate a character. The questions that follow implementation of a character tend to revolve around issues of internal control. For example, one might ask: how to access and offset bones directly in UDK, how to let UDK control the animation procedurally, how a weapon's aim direction can be accessed on the fly, or how to switch between animations according to events dynamically occurring in the scene.

The path to enlightenment in UDK can be a rocky one, and it is helpful to think of it like gaining levels of experience.

Be sure to distinguish the difference between simply replacing the mesh or adjusting the behavior of an existing character class, and creating a new custom character from scratch....