Book Image

Getting Started with UDK

By : John P. Doran
Book Image

Getting Started with UDK

By: John P. Doran

Overview of this book

<p>UDK, the free version of the popular and award-winning Unreal 3 Engine, is an amazing and powerful tool to use for projects of any kind. You can use it to create high-quality games and make your dream games a reality.</p> <p>UDK can be a little intimidating based on the level of games it has contributed to the ever growing and ever exciting world of gaming. Overcome all your apprehensions with this step-by-step guide and build a complete project within the Unreal Development Kit with unique gameplay, custom menus, and a triple A rated finish</p> <p>This book will help you create a custom tower defense game within UDK, even if you have absolutely no prior knowledge of UDK game development.</p> <p>In next to no time, you will learn how to create any kind of environment within UDK. With your basic environment created, you will make use of simple visual scripting to create a tower defense game complete with enemies attacking in waves. We then finish off the game with custom menus and a Heads Up Display. The final step is to release your game into the wild and give others the excitement of playing it.</p>
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Creating the main menu into UDK


Now that we have our content, let's bring it in! Perform the following steps:

  1. UDK can only import Flash files that are within a specific folder. Inside your file browser, go to the folder that contains .fla and .as files that we created earlier. In that folder you should see a file with a .swf extension. Copy that file and go to your UDK folder at UDKGame\Flash\ and create a new folder called TDGame. Inside that folder, paste the .swf Flash movie files.

  2. Start up UDK again. Open up the content browser and click on the Import button. Find the movie files and click on OK. You'll notice that the Import dialog already sets the package name to TDGame, so just click on OK and save this package.

  3. Now, the first thing we are going to do is to create the main menu level. First create a new level by navigating to File | New Level. From the menu that pops up, select Blank Map.

  4. Now we still need to spawn a hero, so first right-click on the image of the box on the left toolbar...