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

Making a comparison following a countdown


In this recipe we'll shoot at a flying monster. What we'll check for is whether or not the player can shoot the dragon out of the sky in a set time. If they do, then they will get to load the next level. If they haven't the current level will reload. Given the reward of progression, we also discuss the difference between PIE, which is a quick emulation of the game in the editor, and Play on PC mode, which emulates all the features of a cooked, packaged game (see Chapter 1, Heads Up, under the recipe Cooking a map with Unreal Frontend).

Getting ready

Open the map Packt_04_Comparison_Start.UDK. This scene features an enclosure around which a monstrous creature is circling. PIE to see if you can shoot down the monster with provided rocket launcher. There is a need for deflection shooting, where you aim ahead of the trajectory of the target, to get a hit.

How to do it...

  1. Once you are competent at shooting down the monster, you may want to inspect the Kismet...