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

Leaving a bloody trail


One way to improve the integration of a character into a game is through their footsteps left in snow, sand, or mud, or their wet footprints from stepping in water or, as in this case, a trail of their blood on the ground when they are injured. In this recipe we'll make a sprinkling of blood that spatters on the ground when an injured character is moving. Then when the character dies we'll pool the blood around them. It is customary in games to fade this kind of effect over time to avoid rendering too many particles.

Getting Ready

Open the map Packt_07_BloodTrails_Start.UDK and note that there is already a Kismet sequence set up. If you want an explanation of the functionality here, look to Chapter 4, Got Your Wires Crossed? Everything here is also covered there. We will be adding variables after we make the particle system.

How to do it...

  1. In the content browser, right-click and choose New Particle System, and call it Yourfolder.Cascade.BloodSplatter. In its Required...