Unreal Engine 4 Game Development Essentials

Key Features

• Get to grips with the user interface of Unreal Engine 4 and find out more about its various robust features
• Create dream video games with the help of the different tools Unreal Engine 4 offers
• Create video-games and fully utilize the power of Unreal Engine 4 to bring games to life through this step-by-step guide

Book Description

Unreal Engine 4 is a complete suite of game development tools that gives you power to develop your game and seamlessly deploy it to iOS and Android devices. It can be used for the development of simple 2D games or even stunning high-end visuals. Unreal Engine features a high degree of portability and is a tool used by many game developers today.

This book will introduce you to the most popular game development tool called Unreal Engine 4 with hands-on instructions for building stunning video games. You will begin by creating a new project or prototype by learning the essentials of Unreal Engine by getting familiar with the UI and Content Browser. Next, we'll import a sample asset from Autodesk 3ds max and learn more about Material Editor. After that we will learn more about Post Process. From there we will continue to learn more about Blueprints, Lights, UMG, C++ and more.

What you will learn

• Download both the binary and source version of Unreal Engine 4 and get familiar with the UI
• Get to know more about the Material Editor and how it works
• Add a post process to the scene and alter it to get a unique look for your scene
• Acquaint yourself with the unique and exclusive feature of Unreal Engine 4―Blueprints
• Find out more about Static and Dynamic lighting and the difference between various lights
• Use Matinee to create cut scenes
• Create a health bar for the player with the use of Unreal Motion Graphics (UMG)
• Get familiar with Cascade Particle Editor

About the Author

Satheesh PV is a game programmer living in Mumbai, India. He was selected by Epic Games as one of the closed beta testers for Unreal Engine 4 before its public release. He started his career as a game developer in 2012 by making a first person multiplayer game with his brother and close friend using Unreal Development Kit. He also created Unreal X-Editor, which was an IDE developed for UnrealScript, the native scripting language of Unreal Engine 3. He is also a moderator at Unreal Engine forums as well as a spotlight member and engine contributor.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Unreal Engine 4
2. Importing Assets
3. Materials
4. Post Process
5. Lights
6. Blueprints
7. Matinee
8. Unreal Motion Graphics
9. Particles
10. Introduction to Unreal C++
11. Packaging Project