Preface

Immerse yourself in Unreal game projects with this book, written by four highly experienced industry professionals with many years of combined experience with Unreal Engine. Elevating Game Experiences with Unreal Engine 5 will walk you through the latest version of Unreal Engine by helping you get hands-on with the game creation projects.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, where you'll learn the concepts of line traces, collisions, projectiles, user interface, and sound effects. You'll also discover how to combine these concepts to showcase your new skills. The second project, a side-scroller game, will help you implement concepts such as animation blending, enemy AI, spawning objects, and collectibles. And finally, you'll cover the key concepts in creating a multiplayer environment as you work on the third project - an FPS game. By the end of the Unreal Engine book, you'll have a broad understanding of how to use the tools that the game engine provides to start building your own games.

Who this book is for

This book is for game developers looking to get started with using Unreal Engine 5 for their game development projects. Anyone who has used Unreal Engine before and wants to consolidate, improve, and apply their skills will find this book useful. To better grasp the concepts explained in this book, prior knowledge of C++ basics (such as variables, functions, classes, polymorphism, and pointers) is required. For full compatibility with the IDE used in this book, a Windows system is recommended.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to Unreal Engine, explores the Unreal Engine editor. You will be introduced to the editor's interface, see how to manipulate actors in a level, understand the basics of the blueprint visual scripting language, and discover how to create material assets that can then be used by meshes.

Chapter 2, Working with Unreal Engine, introduces Unreal Engine game fundamentals, along with how to create a C++ project and set up the Content Folder of projects. You'll also be introduced to the topic of animations.

Chapter 3, Character Class Components and Blueprint Setup, introduces you to the Unreal Character class, along with the concept of object inheritance and how to work with input mappings.

Chapter 4, Getting Started with Player Input, introduces the topic of player input. You will learn how to associate a key press or a touch input with an in-game action, such as jumping or moving, through the use of action mappings and axis mappings.

Chapter 5, Query with Line Traces, starts a new project called Dodgeball. In this chapter, you will learn about the concept of line traces and the various ways in which they can be used in games.

Chapter 6, Setting Up Collision Objects, explores the topic of object collision. You will learn about collision components, collision events, and physics simulation. You will also study the topic of timers, the projectile movement component, and physical materials.

Chapter 7, Working with UE5 Utilities, teaches you how to implement some useful utilities available in Unreal Engine, including actor components, interfaces, and blueprint function libraries, which will help keep your projects well structured and approachable for other people that join your team.

Chapter 8, Creating User Interfaces with UMG, explores the topic of game UI. You will learn how to make menus and HUDs using Unreal Engine's UI system, UMG, as well as how to display the player character's health using a progress bar.

Chapter 9, Adding Audio-Visual Elements, introduces the topic of sounds and particle effects in Unreal Engine. You will learn how to import sound files to the project and use them as both 2D and 3D sounds, as well as how to add existing particle systems to the game. Lastly, a new level will be made that uses all the game mechanics built in the last few chapters to conclude the Dodgeball project.

Chapter 10, Creating the SuperSideScroller Game, discusses in detail the goals of the SuperSideScroller project and covers an overview of how animation works in Unreal Engine 5 through examples of manipulating the default Mannequin Skeleton.

Chapter 11, Working with Blend Space 1D, Key Bindings, and State Machines, teaches you how to use Blend Space 1D, Animation State Machines, and the Enhanced Input System in Unreal Engine 5 to create working movement-based animation logic for the player character.

Chapter 12, Animation Blending and Montages, discusses further animation concepts in Unreal Engine 5 such as Animation Blending and Animation Montages to allow for concurrent animation to occur when the player character moves and throws the projectile.

Chapter 13, Creating and Adding the Enemy Artificial Intelligence, teaches you how to use AI Controller, Blackboards, and Behavior Trees in Unreal Engine 5 to create simple AI logic for an enemy that the player can face.

Chapter 14, Spawning the Player Projectile, teaches you how to spawn and destroy game objects, and uses additional animation-based concepts such as Anim Notifies and Anim Notify states to spawn the player projectile during the throwing animation.

Chapter 15, Exploring Collectibles, Power-Ups, and Pickups, introduces you to UI concepts of UMG in Unreal Engine 5 and puts your knowledge to the test in creating additional collectibles and power-ups for the player.

Chapter 16, Getting Started with Multiplayer Basics, introduces you to multiplayer and how the server/client architecture works, as well as covering concepts such as connections, ownership, roles, and variable replication. It also covers 2D Blend Spaces to create an animation grid for 2D movement and the Transform Modify Bone control to change the transform of a bone at runtime.

Chapter 17, Using Remote Procedure Calls, teaches you how remote procedure calls work, the different types, and important considerations when using them. It also shows how to expose enumerations to the editor and how to use array index wrapping to cycle between an array in both directions.

Chapter 18, Using Gameplay Framework Classes in Multiplayer, explains how to use the most important classes in the Gameplay Framework in multiplayer. It also explains more about Game Mode, Player State, Game State, and some useful engine built-in functionality.

To get the most out of this book

To access the files of the Unreal Engine GitHub repository linked throughout this book, make sure to follow these instructions:

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue-on-github

If you get an error 404 on a link from this book to the Unreal Engine documentation, it means that it hasn't been updated yet to 5.0. You should pick the previous engine version from the dropdown on the top left corner of the page.

Installing Visual Studio

Because we'll be using C++ while working with Unreal Engine 5, we'll need an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that easily works alongside the engine. Visual Studio Community is the best IDE you have available for this purpose on Windows. If you're using macOS or Linux, you'll have to use another IDE, such as Visual Studio Code, Qt Creator, or Xcode (available exclusively on macOS).

The instructions given in this book are specific to Visual Studio Community on Windows, so if you are using a different OS and/or IDE, then you will need to do your research on how to set these up for use in your working environment. In this section, you'll be taken through the installation of Visual Studio, so that you can easily edit UE5's C++ files:

1. Go to the Visual Studio download web page at https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/downloads. The recommended Visual Studio Community version for the Unreal Engine 5 version we'll be using in this book (5.0.3) is Visual Studio Community 2022. Be sure to download that version.
2. When you do, open the executable file that you just downloaded. It should eventually take you to a window where you'll be able to pick the modules of your Visual Studio installation. There, you'll have to tick the Game Development with C++ module and then click the Install button in the bottom-right corner of the window. After you click that button, Visual Studio will start downloading and installing. When the installation is complete, it may ask you to reboot your PC. After rebooting your PC, Visual Studio should be installed and ready for use.
3. When you run Visual Studio for the first time, you may see a few windows, the first one of which is the login window. If you have a Microsoft Outlook/Hotmail account, you should use that account to log in, otherwise, you can skip login by clicking Not now, maybe later.

Note

If you don't input an email address, you will only have 30 days to use Visual Studio before it locks out...