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

Introduction


UDK includes a bag of fireworks called Cascade. Cascade is not only a sprite particle generator but can also produce trailing ribbons, laser beams, and geometry arrays. Cascade has many features, and can be daunting to learn, but with patience proves to be a very complete and comfortable Particle Editor. Earlier in the book, in Chapter 2, Notes From an Unreal World, in the recipe Creating a steamy plume in Cascade, we covered the basics of a particle emitter's anatomy.

Now we'll look closer. One of the most important features of Cascade to learn early on is handling the Distribution values for the various modules, which provide a way to set values or value ranges to parameters of an emitter, such as direction, speed, age, color, and rotation. Unfortunately it is also a lot to cope with on your first try. Distributions are split up into Constants (static single values), Vectors (XYZ values), and Particle Parameters (named values something else can access and affect). The properties...