Unreal Engine 4: How to Develop Your First Two Games

In this course you'll learn the basics of blueprint and gain an understanding of the Material Editor - using these to create your own pinball.

Simulating physics works extremely well in most scenarios with Unreal Engine but there are times where you will want your own twist on the physics. In this section you will be using physics simulation to create a moving ball and modifying it to suite our needs. You will also be creating a basic game environment through the use of Geometry tools.

Now its time for you to create some gameplay mechanics, starting with the pinball bumpers! Using blueprint you can create a simple bumper to push your ball in a specific direction.

Add effects to your bumper actor using blueprint, materials and sound cues.

Using the Construction Script and an Enumeration to create Flippers for your pinball game, design their Flip/Flop functions, and apply two Material Instances to alter their appearance.

Player Controllers are the central location for any input of your game, using them you can control your flippers to start to bring life into your pinball game.

Pinball isn't quite pinball without the ball plunger. Using blueprint you will create a ball plunger to shoot the ball into play.

In this section you'll gain an understanding of how to create and make use of a delegate, using it to create a spawn, reset and destroy condition.

It's time to start a basic score system, adding points when your ball hits the bumpers and keeping track of it for later use!

Creating your own HUD is extremely simple using the Unreal Motion Graphics tool. You will be using UMG to create a basic UI solution to display player score.

Create your own scoring system using blueprint and adjusting the saved scores on an end game condition.

In this lesson you’ll continue on from the previous lesson, learning how to save your high score data out to keep track of who’s boss at your pinball game.

Again, you’ll continue from where you left off with end game conditions, extending the functionality and adding an end game menu to allow users to record their highscores.

It's time for you to create a basic Start Menu using UMG and create your own start game condition to link to your start button.

You will create your own spline mesh that will act as your pinball rails. Diving into splines can be confusing, but follow along and you will get the result you desire!

Child actors are an easy way to duplicate an object/actor without requiring manually adding the same code and functionality. In this section you will gain a basic understanding of how child actors work.

Here you'll be taking advantage of the child actors to create your own, entirely different, actor. 

A more in-depth look at how you can create, bind and call an event dispatcher within blueprints to allow your actors to communicate between blueprints.

In this section you'll gain an understanding of how Morph targets are used in Unreal Engine and how you can use them to create your own game elements. Specifically we'll be looking at how you can create a bumper that appears to physically bump your ball.

Adding sounds can be confusing in Unreal but by following along in this section you'll be able to create your own sound cues and play them in various ways directly from blueprint.

Dynamic audio components are an easy way to adjust your sound, well, dynamically. You will learn how to adjust various properties based on game conditions and apply them to your sound cues.

A pinball game is just not complete without an entry door. You'll learn how to create your own and whats required to allow physics to take its part on an actor.

Tilt is a classic maneuver in pinball. You'll learn how to create your own using camera shakes and impulses.

It's time to add some life to your pinball game by adding some basic lighting, meshes and materials to give your pinball table more of a styled feel.

Here you'll learn how to create your own Decal materials. Decal materials are an easy way to get a nice, polished, logo/decal to your environment. 

Learn how to improve your decals and step them up a notch by enabling and using D-Buffer decals.

In this section you'll see how using textures in your UMG UI can drastically improve the professional look of your game and how you can make use of UI Textures in Unreal Engine.

Anyone and everybody who uses Unreal Engine will instantly recognise the default fonts. Here you'll learn how to import and use your own fonts in your UMG Widgets.

Polishing up the score system to correctly output your highscores on the main menu.

Finally you will learn how to create some basic effects to bring just that bit more life to your game through the Cascade editor.

In this section, we will move away from pinball, and look at some of the more powerful tools and techniques we can use to create an awesome top down 'Survival Game', complete with pickups and enemy AI.

Some of the required resources have been included in the attached zip file.

Please note if you are a Linux user or are unable to access the Marketplace from the Launcher you should be able to download the required assets from the Marketplace section of the Unreal Engine website.

This lesson will introduce you to the basics of painting landscape in UE4. Upon completion, you will be able to tell the difference between 'weighted' and 'un-weighted' painting, as well as how and where to apply them.

Now that you know the basics of landscape painting, we will look at some of the more advanced tools and techniques that you can use. This lesson will introduce you to basic landscape materials and material layers.

In this lesson, you will learn about 'material distance blending', how to use it with your landscape materials, and the reasons why it is a useful feature to leverage in this case.

In this lesson, you will be creating more complex materials that you can use to paint realistic details on to your landscape.

In this lesson we will look at 'material tessellation' , and you will learn about when and how it can be used to enhance the detail and performance of your landscapes.

In this lesson, you will learn how to set up a 'landscape grass type' actor and use it to paint grass directly on to your landscapes.

In this lesson, you will learn how paint foliage directly on to your landscape using the foliage tool. It will cover basic set up as well as a brief explanation of the various parameters and their function within the toolset.

In this lesson, you will apply what you have learned previously to create an lanscape that is suited to the 'Survival Game' project. Upon completion, you will have a basic knowledge of the tools and processes required to create custom landscapes for your own projects.

In this lesson, you will be creating an initial layout of the playspace using the assets you imported earlier.

In this lesson, you will start to block out the castle interior using various Static Mesh actors.

In this lesson, you will be creating the walls of your castle using a combination of BSP and Static Mesh actors.

In this lesson, you will continue to add polish to the newly created castle walls.

In this lesson, you will continue to build up your environment through the clever placement of a collection of assets.

In this video, Chris will be polishing up the the scene layout.This is an optional accelerated video for those who are interested in how the final version of the scene was created.

In this lesson, we will focus on the lighting and post-processing effects in your map.

In this lesson, you will learn how to set up a simple character AI that allows a character to move between points. The lesson will cover simple Nav-Mesh volumes.

In this lesson, you will learn the basics of setting up a character mesh.

In this lesson, we will start to delve in to the world of chracter animation in UE4. This will include 'Blendspaces' and 'Animation Blueprints'

In this lesson, you will be looking at the 'animation states' in more depth.

In this lesson, you learn how to create a player controller class.The player controller class will hold much of the functionality for your player character.

In this lesson, you will learn how to add movement functionality to the player controller class. This will include mapping inputs in the project settings.

In this lesson, you learn how to set up some basic attack animations for the player character.

In this lesson, you will learn how to setup an animation combo system that will give your combat a more realistic look and feel.

In this lesson, you will learn how to create weapons that can be wielded by your character.

In this lesson, you will learn how to set up the functionality that will apply damage to the enemy characters when they are hit with a weapon or projectile.

In this lesson, you will learn how to add some behavioural logic to the enemy AI.

In this lesson, you will be creating a custom particle effect that will accompany your magic attack

In this lesson, you will learn how to make a custom projectile that will be used as a thrown magic 'bullet' to damage other characters.

In this lesson, you will learn how to spawn projectiles that can damage enemy targets.

In this lesson, you will be polishing up the the magic attack with custom animation blends and effects.

In this lesson, you will learn how to develop the basic 'game rules' for your top down 'Survival Game'.

In this lesson, you will learn how to create a robust enemy spawning system.

In this lesson, you will build upon the spawning system by adding some new enemy types.

In this lesson, you will learn how to add health bars to the player and enemy pawns. 

In this lesson, you will learn how to create pickups that can be collected by the pawns within your game world. Pickups are an essential part of many games and can include things like magic, health, and weapons.

In this lesson, you will learn how to detach and animate a camera using camera blend targets.

In this lesson, you will package your game into an executable version that you can share with others. By the end of this lesson, you will have created three projects and developed a basic understanding of how to use the various features and functionality within Unreal Engine 4. You now have everything you need to make your own Unreal projects.