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

Kismet UI essentials


In this recipe we'll construct a simple network and explain its anatomy. Since the word Kismet means destiny, we'll add a random hurt/heal loop to doom the player to a slow, unavoidable death (but you can always come back afterwards). We'll do this using actions entirely within Kismet to affect the player.

Getting ready

Open UDK and choose File | New and select the Midday Lighting map template. Click in the View menu and choose World Properties and there set the Game Type for PIE to UTGame. This gives us a head-up display in which we can see, amongst other things, the health changes this recipe involves.

Open the Kismet Editor by pressing the icon [ ].

How to do it...

  1. Hold P and click to add a Player Variable. The Player Variable currently says All Players, which for now is fine as that's just us. A list of hotkeys for adding Kismet nodes is at http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/KismetUserGuide.html.

  2. To move a node, hold Ctrl + LMB and drag it. Hold LMB and drag to pan the view...