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

Swapping control of a Bot using Possess Pawn


In this recipe we'll allow the player to take control of an AI pawn, or Bot. This allows the player to jump to a different area of a level while their character remains where they left it. We'll then swap control back again. This is a fairly simple operation, but will lead in to the following recipe, on cinematic staging using camera director groups in Matinee.

Getting ready

Open the map Packt_04_Possess_Start.UDK. The scene consists of a cave mouth, looking out into a landscape the player cannot reach during gameplay. The player starts in a small compound outside the cave, and a Bot is spawned on the other side of a sliding gate. The scene is a continuation of the previous recipe's scene and we'll just be adding functionality in Kismet.

How to do it...

  1. For this scene, let's view the action in third person. Open Kismet [ ] and right-click and add a New Action | Misc | Console Command to the existing Player Spawned event. In the Commands | [0] property...