John P. Doran - Getting started with UDK

John P. Doran is a technical game designer who has been creating games for over 10 years. He has worked on an assortment of games in teams from just himself to over 70 in student, mod, indie, and professional projects.

He previously worked at LucasArts on Star Wars 1313 as a game design intern. He later graduated from DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, WA, with a Bachelor of Science in Game Design.

John is currently a software engineer at DigiPen's Singapore campus and is tutoring and assisting students with difficulties in computer science concepts, programming, linear algebra, game design, and advanced usage of UDK, Flash, and Unity in a development environment.

This is his third book after UDK iOS Game Development Beginner's Guide and Mastering UDK Game Development , both of which are also available from Packt Publishing .

He can be found online at >.

I want to thank my brother Chris Doran and my fiance Hannah Mai, for being supportive and patient with me as I spent my free time and weekends away from them as I had to spend time writing the book.

On that same note, I also want to thank Samir Abou Samra and Elie Hosry for their support and encouragement while working on this book, as well as the rest of the DigiPen Singapore staff.

I want to thank Erol Staveley who approached me for writing again as well as everyone else at Packt who were so helpful, as always!

Last but not the least, I'd love to thank my family as well as my parents, Joseph and Sandra Doran, who took me seriously when I told them I wanted to make games for a living.

Dan Weiss is currently a programmer working at Psyonix Studios in San Diego, CA. He is a 2010 graduate of DigiPen Institute of Technology, having worked on titles such as Attack of the 50ft Robot! during his time there. He has been working in the Unreal engine since 2004, independently producing the mod Unreal Demolition for Unreal Tournament 2004 and Unreal Tournament 3. At Psyonix, he has been involved with Unreal engine work on mobile devices, having released ARC Squadron for iOS devices.

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Preface

The UDK, which is a free version of the popular and award-winning Unreal 3 engine, is an amazing and powerful tool to use for projects of any kind. You can use it to create high-quality games and make your dream games a reality. UDK can be a little intimidating based on the level of games it has contributed to the ever growing and exciting world of gaming. Overcome all your apprehensions with this step-by-step guide and build a complete project within the Unreal Development Kit with unique gameplay, custom menus, and a triple A-rated finish.

This book will help you create a custom Tower Defense game within UDK and a game you can show your friends, even if you have absolutely no prior knowledge of UDK game development.

In next to no time, you will learn how to create any kind of environment within the UDK. With your basic environment created, you will make use of simple visual scripting to create a complete Tower Defense game with enemies attacking in waves. We then finish off the game with custom menus and a Heads Up Display. The final step is to release your game into the world and give others the excitement of playing it.

What this book covers

, Augmenting the UDK , introduces us to the UDK and helps us create our gameplay environment out of nothing but making use of CSG and briefly touching on Kismet to create third-person gameplay.

, Tower Defense , teaches us how to implant the basic gameplay for our project making use of Kismet to spawn enemies, and how to create spawnable towers in the game world making use of prefabs.

, Detailing Environments , discusses the role of an environment artist doing a texture pass on the environment. After that, we will place meshes to make our level pop with added details. Finally, we will add a few more things to make the experience as nice looking as possible.

, Finishing Touches , helps us create the basis of a Heads Up Display making use of Scaleform importing a project from Flash and touch on how to communicate between UDK and Flash. The HUD will adjust based on variables we've created in Kismet. We will also create a quick main menu level, which we can use to publish our final game! Then we will actually publish our game making use of the Unreal Frontend and share it with the world!