Game Development Projects with Unreal Engine

Learn the tools and techniques of game design using a project-based approach with Unreal Engine 4 and C++

Key Features

• Kickstart your career or dive into a new hobby by exploring game design with UE4 and C++
• Learn the techniques needed to prototype and develop your own ideas
• Reinforce your skills with project-based learning by building a series of games from scratch

Book Description

Game development can be both a creatively fulfilling hobby and a full-time career path. It's also an exciting way to improve your C++ skills and apply them in engaging and challenging projects.

Game Development Projects with Unreal Engine starts with the basic skills you'll need to get started as a game developer. The fundamentals of game design will be explained clearly and demonstrated practically with realistic exercises. You'll then apply what you've learned with challenging activities.

The book starts with an introduction to the Unreal Editor and key concepts such as actors, blueprints, animations, inheritance, and player input. You'll then move on to the first of three projects: building a dodgeball game. In this project, you'll explore line traces, collisions, projectiles, user interface, and sound effects, combining these concepts to showcase your new skills.

You'll then move on to the second project; a side-scroller game, where you'll implement concepts including animation blending, enemy AI, spawning objects, and collectibles. The final project is an FPS game, where you will cover the key concepts behind creating a multiplayer environment.

By the end of this Unreal Engine 4 game development book, you'll have the confidence and knowledge to get started on your own creative UE4 projects and bring your ideas to life.

What you will learn

• Create a fully-functional third-person character and enemies
• Build navigation with keyboard, mouse, gamepad, and touch controls
• Program logic and game mechanics with collision and particle effects
• Explore AI for games with Blackboards and Behavior Trees
• Build character animations with Animation Blueprints and Montages
• Test your game for mobile devices using mobile preview
• Add polish to your game with visual and sound effects
• Master the fundamentals of game UI design using a heads-up display

Who this book is for

This book is suitable for anyone who wants to get started using UE4 for game development. It will also be useful for anyone who has used Unreal Engine before and wants to consolidate, improve and apply their skills. To grasp the concepts explained in this book better, you must have prior knowledge of the basics of C++ and understand variables, functions, classes, polymorphism, and pointers. For full compatibility with the IDE used in this book, a Windows system is recommended.

Table of Contents

1. Unreal Engine Introduction
2. Working with Unreal Engine
3. Character Class Components and Blueprint Setup
4. Player Input
5. Line Traces
6. Collision Objects
7. UE4 Utilities
8. User Interfaces
9. Audio-Visual Elements
10. Creating a SuperSideScroller Game
11. Blend Spaces 1D, Key Bindings, and State Machines
12. Animation Blending and Montages
13. Enemy Artificial Intelligence
14. Spawning the Player Projectile
15. Collectibles, Power-Ups, and Pickups
16. Multiplayer Basics
17. Remote Procedure Calls
18. Gameplay Framework Classes in Multiplayer

Hammad Fozi has been passionately involved with technology since he was 12 years of age. He has received several awards in ICT and Thinking Skills during his studies. In 2016, Hammad interned at Vanilla Arcade and developed a product known as ""Camera from the Past"" which is displayed publicly at the National History Museum in Lahore and is a source of great fun for the visitors and tourists. Having graduated as a Computer Scientist in 2018, he quickly consolidated his name as an Unreal Engine developer. Currently, Hammad is an Unreal enthusiast, co-managing the Unreal Developer Community of Pakistan. He works as a lead Unreal developer for Terra Virtua and is the sole developer behind their explosively popular Fan Cave product, showcasing amazing digital merch from some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry such as Legendary Entertainment and Paramount Pictures.

Gonçalo Marques has been an active gamer since the age of 6. He worked as a freelancer for a Portuguese startup, Sensei Tech, where he developed an internal system using UE4 to produce datasets that assist with machine learning. He has since participated in several projects as a freelancer. Gonçalo also released a free and open-source plugin called UI Navigation, which has garnered an extremely positive reception with over 50K downloads. It is still receiving frequent updates and fixes. Currently, he is working at ZPX, a game studio in Lisbon that frequently collaborates with Funcom and has contributed to games, such as Conan Exiles, Mutant Year Zero, and Moons of Madness. Gonçalo has helped in the development of Moons of Madness and is currently working on a new Funcom game in the Dune universe.

David Pereira started his game development journey in 1998, where he learned to use Clickteam's The Games Factory to make his own small games. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in computer science from FCT-UNL, where he learned how to program in C++ with OpenGL and DirectX, which allowed him to create more complex games. After working in IT consulting for a few years, he joined Miniclip Portugal where he worked on popular mobile games like 8 Ball Pool, Gravity Guy 1 and 2, Extreme Skater, iStunt2, and Hambo. Today, he's working on his own game, a soon to be announced First-Person Action RPG.

Devin Sherry is a technical designer at the game studio called People Can Fly and works on their newest IP that is built with Unreal Engine 4. Devin studied game development and game design at the University of Advancing Technology, where he obtained a bachelor's degree in game design in 2012. He contributed as a level designer/scripter on a student project made in Unreal Engine 3/UDK called The Afflicted, which was showcased at GDC Play during the Game Developers Conference in 2013. During his time tenure there, he worked in Unreal Engine 4 as a general Blueprint scripter, prototyped game mechanics, and created UI elements in UMG. He also managed C++ programmers, delegated bugs, and led team meetings.