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Building an RPG with Unreal Get to grips with building the foundations of an RPG using Unreal Engine 4 Steve Santello Alan R. Stagner BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI Building an RPG with Unreal Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. First published: January 2016 Production reference: 1200116 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. Livery Place 35 Livery Street Birmingham B3 2PB, UK. ISBN 978-1-78217-563-6 www.packtpub.com Credits Authors Copy Editors Steve Santello Trishya Hajare Alan R. Stagner Rashmi Sawant Reviewers Project Coordinator Patrick Dinklage Neha Bhatnagar Scott Hafner Marcin Kamiński Proofreader Safis Editing Alankar Pradhan Indexer Commissioning Editor Hemangini Bari Edward Bowkett Production Coordinator Acquisition Editor Shantanu N. Zagade Tushar Gupta Cover Work Content Development Editor Shantanu N. Zagade Divij Kotian Technical Editor Taabish Khan About the Authors Steve Santello is a well-seasoned educator and veteran of the game industry from Chicago, Illinois, USA. His cross-disciplinary study in art, design, programming, and project management has allowed him to explore every facet of game development. As an educator, he has used his passion to teach others about game development, and has populated the game industry with many talented developers over the years. He has worked on over 10 different titles as a 2D and 3D artist for the Chicago game developer Babaroga. With Babaroga, he worked as one of the four artists on many mobile titles published by EA such as Spore Origins, The Godfather Game, and Pictionary: The Game of Quick Draw. He also worked on many mobile titles published by Disney Interactive, such as Hannah Montana In Action and Meet the Robinsons. He and his development team also developed a number of original IPs such as Babaroga Eats Children and BEES!. Since 2006, Steve has also been a university professor. He helped pioneer the Digital Entertainment and Game Design program at ITT Technical Institute in St. Rose, LA, and also the Game and Simulation Programming program at DeVry University in Addison, IL. He has also served as an adjunct professor at the Illinois Institute of Art, Chicago, where he taught game prototyping as a team manager and acting producer. On the side, he developed game and simulation prototypes and plans to release his first two independent games, which were developed with Unreal Engine 4 sometime in 2015. He has writing contributions in Game Development Essentials: Game Interface Design 2nd Edition, Kevin Saunders and Jeannie Novak, Delmar Cengage Learning. In that book, he wrote about the past, present, and future of the user interface in games, which included breaking down the HUD in games such as Deadspace, and talked about how he and his team designed the user interface in Spore Origins. Steve is currently working towards tenure as a CIS gaming instructor at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, USA. Although he is very proud of his success, he knows that all his combined experiences have played a major role in where he resides today. Alan R. Stagner is an independent developer. He was introduced to programming by his father; he sought out different ways to create games in a variety of languages. Most recently, he found the Unity game engine and was instantly hooked, and discovered his love of multiplayer game development. He has also dabbled in database and server programming from time to time, mostly involving PHP and MySQL, with recent forays into ASP.NET. About the Reviewers Patrick Dinklage was born in 1987 in Datteln and now lives in Dortmund, Germany. He is a professional software developer, music producer, and music label owner who has also gathered experience in game development through modding, university, and projects in his free time. Patrick started working with games by modifying them, starting with the Nintendo 64 using a gameshark for RAM hacking. He went on to found a successful modular C++ modding system for Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 – Yuri's Revenge. The system is still being developed to date under the name Ares by a new team. In the mid 2000s, he started work on several Unreal Tournament 2004 mods, including VCTF4—a version of capture the flag with vehicles and four teams. The more outstanding TitanRPG is a standalone role-playing game system tailored for the packed online action of UT2004, with features such as leveling to power up abilities, item inventory, healing, creature summoning, construction, and so on. This way, he could gather a deep knowledge of the Unreal Engine concepts. Besides modding, he developed a Java binding to the C++ multimedia library SFML that can be used as a core to build games. Professionally, he worked as a Java developer for seven years in an established service enterprise that develops phone, computer network, and system management solutions. Currently, he is studying IT at the technical university in Dortmund, Germany, with the goal of obtaining a master's degree and then a dissertation. Here, he has worked on several experimental game projects using the Unity 3D engine, and is currently helping to develop a virtual reality biking game with the aim of motivating cardiac patients to do their daily training. Finally, he is a keen gamer (explorer type—in love with huge and deep worlds); furthermore, he produces music under the name Veasna and runs a small music label called Goa Trance Music in the relatively niche genre of Goa trance. Scott Hafner is a professional game designer with over 10 years of experience in the video game industry. Over the course of his career, he has worked as a producer, game designer, and level designer on a range of platforms and genres including MMOs, third-person shooters, and RPGs. I would like to thank my fiancée for her continued encouragement and support in all that I do! Marcin Kamiński works for Nordic Games as a programming consultant and has his own company, Digital Hussars. Previously, he worked for Artifex Mundi, CI Games, CTAdventure, and Vivid Games. His main fields of expertise are artificial intelligence and network programming. For 14 years, he has helped develop great games for PC, consoles, and mobiles. Marcin was also the reviewer of the book Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine, Brenden Sewell; Unity iOS Essentials, Robert Wiebe; and Unity 2D Game Development Cookbook, Claudio Scolastici; all published by Packt Publishing. Alankar Pradhan is from Mumbai, Maharashtra, and he did his schooling at I.E.S.'s CPV High School. He is an ambitious person who loves interacting with new people, dancing, kickboxing, traveling, spending leisure time with friends, or playing games on a PC and mobile. Games have been always a passion in his life. More than just playing the game, how things work was his main curiosity. Hence, he decided to pursue his career in game development. He graduated with a BSc (Hons) in software development from Sheffield Hallam University, UK. He received his master's in video game programming and management (videogame director) (BAC+5 equivalent) from DSK Supinfogame where he undertook industry-oriented projects to increase his skill sets and gave his best to do so. He worked as a game programming intern at The Walt Disney India Pvt Ltd. During his internship, he worked on a live project called Hitout Heroes. His name was added to the credits due to the notable work he accomplished. He also interned as a game programmer with DSK Green Ice Games and then continued working as a video game programmer on a game targeted for PC and consoles. The game Death God University (D.G.U.) was released on 1st July 2015. Another project he is working on is The Forsaken Mountains. Alankar has worked on many small projects in a team and also individually so as to sharpen his own skills in various languages such as C#, C++, Java, Unreal Script, Python, Lua, Groovy/Grails, HTML5/CSS, and so on. He is familiar with engines such as Unity 3D, Unreal Development Kit, Visual Studio, and also SDKs such as NetBeans, Eclipse, and Wintermute. In 2013, his dissertation on Comparison between Python and Lua in Gaming Industry was published as a book. He has even worked as a technical reviewer on the books Creating E-Learning Games with Unity, David Horachek, and Learning Unreal Engine iOS Game Development, Muhammad A. Moniem. Alankar likes to read, listen to music, and write poems and short stories at times. He has his own website (http://alan.poetrycraze.com) where he posts his poems and has also published a book called The Art Of Lost Words, which is available through Amazon. He can be reached at [email protected]. His portfolio site is alankarpradhan.wix.com/my-portfolio. He is available on Facebook at www.facebook.com/alankar.pradhan. We are so often caught up in our aim that we forget to appreciate the journey, especially the people we meet on the way.