Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript: Beginner's Guide

Create games beyond your imagination with the Unreal Development Kit

• Dive into game programming with UnrealScript by creating a working example game.
• Learn how the Unreal Development Kit is organized and how to quickly set up your own projects.
• Recognize and fix crashes and other errors that come up during a game's development.
• A practical beginner's guide with fresh, fun writing that keeps you engaged as you learn game programming with UnrealScript.

In Detail

Unreal Development Kit is the free edition of Unreal Engine--the largest game engine in existence with hundreds of shipped commercial titles. The Unreal Engine is a very powerful tool for game development but with something so complex it's hard to know where to start.

This book will teach you how to use the UnrealScript language to create your own games with the Unreal Development Kit by using an example game that you can create and play for yourself. It breaks down the UnrealScript language into easy to follow chapters that will quickly bring you up to speed with UnrealScript game programming.

Unreal Development Kit Game Programming with UnrealScript takes you through the UnrealScript language for the Unreal Development Kit. It starts by walking through a project setup and setting up programs to write and browse code. It then takes you through using variables, functions, and custom classes to alter the game's behavior and create our own functionality. The use and creation of Kismet is also covered. Later, using replication to create and test multiplayer games is discussed. The book closes with code optimization and error handling as well as a few of the less common but useful features of UnrealScript.

What you will learn from this book

• Set up a UDK project and learn how to compile and test your own code
• Learn how to extend the UDK's code to add your own functionality
• Create your own game types, player camera, and HUD
• Learn how UnrealScript interacts with Kismet and create your own Kismet actions and events
• Use networking to create and test multiplayer games
• Optimize your code to fix errors and performance problems
• Use DLLBind to interact with code outside of the UDK

Approach

This is a step-by-step book that builds on your knowledge by adding to an example game over the course of each chapter. Each topic uses example code that can be compiled and tested to show how things work instead of just telling you. Complicated tasks are broken down into easy to follow steps with clear explanations of what each line of code is doing.

Who this book is written for

This book is written for beginners to UnrealScript, whether this is your first experience with programming or you're coming into it from another language and would like to learn how UnrealScript uses concepts you're already familiar with. If you would like to make games with the Unreal Development Kit, this book is for you.

Rachel Cordone

Rachel Cordone is a designer and self-taught UnrealScript programmer who has been working with the Unreal Engine since 1999. She has worked for various game and simulation companies since 2003 including Pipeworks Software and Parsons Brinkerhoff, and has started up her own game company, Stubborn Horse Studios, to make independent games with the Unreal Development Kit. Stubborn Horse's first project, Prometheus, won several awards in Epic Games' Make Something Unreal Contest.