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

Groundwork for adjusting configuration defaults


In this chapter we'll build up from simply changing some trivial configuration settings to orchestrating unique gaming experiences. To start out, we need to make clear how UDK configures content under the hood by introducing the layout and formatting for this kind of file. The experience in this recipe can be likened to savoring morsels of cake samples in a shop before committing to a purchase; while you're not actually changing major settings yet, the aim is to make some tasty observations so later the changes you make will come from informed decisions.

Getting ready

In your UDK installation, you have a folder called C:\UDK\~\UDKGame\Config and it is worthwhile to browse the files here and get to know them. Treat them like the faces of colleagues in a new company. It may take a while, but you'll eventually know all their names! You may want to make an alternative install of UDK before starting this chapter, to protect any content you've been...