Elevating Game Experiences with Unreal Engine 5

Get hands-on with game development tools and techniques to build game project using the latest version of Unreal Engine and C++, two of the most widely used tools in the games industry

Key Features

• Kickstart your career or develop a new hobby by learning game development with Unreal Engine 5 and C++
• Learn techniques to prototype and develop your own ideas with key images printed in color
• Reinforce your skills with project-based learning by building a series of games from scratch

Book Description

Immerse yourself in the 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 this 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.

What you will learn

• Create a fully functional third-person character and enemies
• Implement navigation with keyboard, mouse, and gamepad
• 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
• Polish your game with stunning visual and sound effects
• Explore the fundamentals of game UI using a heads-up display
• Discover how to implement multiplayer in your 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.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Unreal Engine
2. Working with Unreal Engine
3. Character Class Components and Blueprint Setup
4. Getting Started with Player Input
5. Query with Line Traces
6. Setting Up Collision Objects
7. Working with UE5 Utilities
8. Creating User Interfaces with UMG
9. Adding Audio-Visual Elements
10. Creating the SuperSideScroller Game
11. Working with Blend Space 1D, Key Bindings, and State Machines
12. Animation Blending and Montages
13. Creating and Adding the Enemy Artificial Intelligence
14. Spawning the Player Projectile
15. Exploring Collectibles. Power-Ups, and Pickups
16. Getting Started with Multiplayer Basics
17. Using Remote Procedure Calls
18. Using Gameplay Framework Classes in Multiplayer

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.

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.

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.

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).