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


The process of explaining Kismet in this chapter includes some formatting that you will want to get used to. Nodes in Kismet, that carry actions and events, are formatted as follows: Event. Properties of those nodes, and menu choices are formatted as follows: Property. Values that you type in property fields or unique names we've assigned things will be formatted as follows: field name.

Kismet lets us tell game actors how to behave in relation to each other and the player. The editor is a canvas on which to construct a network of connected nodes. It has a Properties window which exposes properties for the selected node, and a Sequences window for navigating layers of the canvas created using Sub-Sequences.

In this chapter we give essential explanations that will allow you to set up your own Kismet, and cover common cases of Kismet-driven functionality in UDK that many games leverage frequently. In the next chapter we cover more challenging examples.