Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine: Build professional 3D games with Unreal Engine 4's Visual Scripting system

Build professional 3D games with Unreal Engine 4's Visual Scripting system

About This Book

• Take your game designs from inspiration to a fully playable game that you can share with the world, without writing a single line of code.
• Learn to use visual scripting to develop gameplay mechanics, UI, visual effects, artificial intelligence, and more.
• Build a first person shooter from scratch with step-by-step tutorials.

Who This Book Is For

Whether you are an experienced game designer or artist looking to test your latest idea, or a complete novice looking to build their first video game, this is a great place to start learning how to build complex game mechanics quickly and easily without writing any text code. No programming experience required!

What You Will Learn

• Prototype and iterate new game mechanics rapidly
• Customize the player's abilities and controls
• Build user interface elements, including health bars and objective counters
• Set up interactions between player actions and game objects in the world
• Create complex enemy AI that can sense the world around it and attack the player
• Design menus that will allow your players to load, pause, and quit the game
• Deploy your game to multiple platforms and share it with the world

In Detail

Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine is a step-by-step approach to building a fully functional game, one system at a time. Starting with a basic First Person Shooter template, each chapter will extend the prototype to create an increasingly complex and robust game experience. You will progress from creating basic shooting mechanics to gradually more complex systems that will generate user interface elements and intelligent enemy behavior. Focusing on universally applicable skills, the expertise you will develop in utilizing Blueprints can translate to other types of genres.

By the time you finish the book, you will have a fully functional First Person Shooter game and the skills necessary to expand on the game to develop an entertaining, memorable experience for your players.

From making customizations to player movement to creating new AI and game mechanics from scratch, you will discover everything you need to know to get started with game development using Blueprints and Unreal Engine 4.

Table of Contents

1. Object Interaction with Blueprints
2. Enhancing Player Abilities
3. Creating Screen UI Elements
4. Creating Constraints & Gameplay Objectives
5. Making Moving Enemies with AI
6. Upgrading the AI Enemies
7. Tracking Game States & Applying Finishing Touches
8. Building & Publishing

Brenden Sewell is a lead game designer at E-Line Media, and has spent the last 5 years designing and creating games that are both fun to play and have educational or social impact. He has been building games since 2002, when Neverwinter Nights taught him an invaluable lesson about the expressive power of game design. In 2010, he graduated with a degree in cognitive science from Indiana University. Since then, he has focused on enhancing his own craft of game design while harnessing its power to do good in the world, and exposing more people to the joy the profession holds.