About the Book
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.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
What you will learnCreate 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 forThis 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:
Table of Contents
Unreal Engine Introduction
Working with Unreal Engine
Character Class Components and Blueprint Setup
Player Input
Line Traces
Collision Objects
UE4 Utilities
User Interfaces
Audio-Visual Elements
Creating a SuperSideScroller Game
Blend Spaces 1D, Key Bindings, and State Machines
Animation Blending and Montages
Enemy Artificial Intelligence
Spawning the Player Projectile
Collectibles, Power-Ups, and Pickups
Multiplayer Basics
Remote Procedure Calls
Gameplay Framework Classes in Multiplayer
About the Author :
Hammad Fozi comes from a gaming background and has been extensively working on Unreal Engine since 2017. He has been part of some very successful AAA projects such as Virtua FanCave (and Metaverse), Unnamed AAA Sci-Fi DJ Experience, Heroes and Generals, and Creed: Rise to Glory VR. Hammad has worked with teams who have had experience working at Ubisoft, Warner Bros. Games, 2K Games, and more! He has successfully helped teams consisting of 10–30 people to scale to 150+ in size over his very short yet impressive career. Hammad currently works as a senior C++ game developer and has extensive experience in working with VR and augmented reality, PC/PS5/Xbox/Android/iOS/macOS game development, and Web3/Metaverse/NFT systems (within Unreal Engine). Gonçalo Marques has been an active gamer since the age of 6. He has been using Unreal Engine since 2016 and has done freelance and consulting work using the engine. Gonçalo also released a free and open source plugin called UI Navigation, which has garnered an extremely positive reception with over 100,000 downloads and is still receiving frequent updates and fixes. Thanks to the development of this plugin, he became an Epic MegaGrant recipient. He is now working at Funcom ZPX, a game studio in Lisbon that has contributed to games such as Conan Exiles, Mutant Year Zero, and Moons of Madness. Gonçalo is currently working on a new Funcom game in the Dune universe. David Pereira started making games in 1998 when he learned how to use Clickteam’s The Games Factory. He graduated in computer science from FCT-UNL, where he learned about C++, OpenGL, and DirectX, which allowed him to create more complex games. After working in IT consulting for a few years, he joined Miniclip in Portugal where he worked on popular mobile games such as 8 Ball Pool, Gravity Guy 1 and Gravity Guy 2, Extreme Skater, iStunt2, Hambo, and many others. Since then, he has been the lead developer for MPC in the John Lewis Christmas VR Experience, worked on an earlier version of Mortal Shell, and did volunteer work teaching people with Asperger’s how to make games with Unreal Engine 4. Today, he’s working on his own game, a soon-to-be-announced first-person action RPG. Devin Sherry is the principal technical designer at People Can Fly in Poland, having worked on Outriders and Outriders: Worldslayer using Unreal Engine 4. Before that, he worked on Aquanox: Deep Descent as a technical designer at the Digital Arrow studio in Serbia. With a decade of experience ranging from the Unreal Developers’ Kit to the newly released Unreal Engine 5, Devin is passionate about creating memorable experiences for players and bringing game mechanics to life.
