Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook

UDK is a free, world class game editing tool and being so powerful it can be daunting to learn. This guide offers an excellent set of targeted recipes to help game artists get up to speed with game designing in UDK.

Unreal Development Kit Game Design Cookbook contains everything you need to jumpstart your game design efforts. The lessons are aimed squarely at the artist’s field of production, with recipes on asset handling, creating content within the editor, animation and visual scripting to get the content working in gameplay.

Unreal Game Development Kit Game Design Cookbook exposes how real-time environments are built using UDK tools. Key features are examined – assets, animation, light, materials, game controls, user interface, special effects, and game interactivity – with the view of making UDK technically accessible so users can transcend technique and focus on their creative design process. The book has well prepared recipes for level designers and artists of all levels. It covers core design tools and processes in the editor, particularly setting up characters, UI approaches, configuration and scripting gameplay. It is a technical guide that allows game artists to go beyond just creating assets, and it includes creative, extensive demonstrations that extend on mere functionality.

What you will learn from this book

• Insights on essential editor functionality
• Handling of custom assets
• Assigning properties to level content
• Determining the best approach to lighting
• Setting up custom character assets
• Implementing classes that handle your character’s behavior
• Required steps to configure UDK to work well for your game
• The functionality of Kismet to drive events and actions
• Ways to use Cascade to create impressive visual effects
• The essentials of UI design with Scaleform and Flash
• Handling of material editor networks
• Ways to introduce animation into your level design

Approach
Written in cookbook style, this book offers many recipes to learn game design with UDK. Each recipe contains step-by-step instructions followed by analysis of what was done in each task and other useful information. The book is designed so that you can read it chapter by chapter, or you can look at the list of recipes and refer to them in no particular order.

Who this book is for
This book is meant for game artists who are getting used to UDK but may feel the need for guidance on matters of implementation. It also targets brave beginners who are struggling to find an all in one package for getting started with UDK, and want a ready to hand reference. Level designers can use this book to gauge their understanding of the editor, check for specific problems, and discover gems they may not have come across before.