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

Creating a regenerative health shield


There are many reasons why a designer may want to get the current value of the player's health. One reason might be to increment damage up to a certain point and no more, or to limit the aggression of opponents based on the health of the player. In this lesson we will log the player's health to an Integer and use that as a multiplier to create a regenerative, but temporary shield. There are many ways to build game mechanics around health, including damage to health based on distance, time, or number of hits. The method here is driven by Kismet. Often anything related to player properties is handled in code by a developer rather than in the level by a gamer, and not surprisingly this exception is fairly scene specific, not a generalized method to effect the player all the time. To provision permanent effects on player health, creating a class is better.

Getting ready

Load the scene from the provided content Packt05_Health_Start.UDK and familiarize yourself...