Watercolor Painting by Anamika Misra
Tuesday 6 August 2013
Getting Started with UDK by John Doran - Book Review
“Getting Started With UDK”, by technical game designer John
Doran, is aimed at those eager upstart programmers and designers who want to
learn how to make games and about the Unreal Engine in particular. Unreal
Engine is developed by Epic Games, with the latest iteration being Unreal
Engine 4 used for next generation console development. Of course, you won’t
learn how to create something so advanced in this book, but by the end of the
book, you will know how to make a decent tower defence game using the Unreal
Development Kit or UDK.
Doran is no stranger to game engines. Graduating from Digipen
Institute of Technology in Redmond and currently working as a software engineer
at Digipen Singapore’s campus, he has experience in both programming and game
design.
UDK is a software development kit which was released soon
after Unreal engine 3, and is available for free to the general public. There
are many books out there which teach certain things about an engine. The good
thing about Doran’s book is that it will teach you how to make a game from
scratch while simultaneously covering all the relevant topics of UDK. If you
haven’t used the engine before, don’t worry. The first chapter will tell you
how to setup UDK and where to download it from. It will also explain you the
user interface of the engine. One topic covered in much detail is Kismet, its
benefits and drawbacks (explained in more detail below). The book is filled with
screenshots, which showcase how to go about completing tasks, and is very user
friendly as a step by step guide for making a game. You will also learn how to
make a Heads Up Display or HUD in Flash by the end of the book.
Despite being excellent rookies, the book is also good for with
no knowledge about coding. You don’t need to learn Unreal Scripting before you
can start making games as the book follows Kismet. Kismet is a flexible and
powerful tool that allows non-programmers to script complex game play flow in
levels. It works by allowing you to connect simple functional objects to form
complex structures, much like connecting branches to a tree.
For those who are already experienced enough in programming
and UDK, the book won’t exactly teach you anything new. For those who want to
learn more about Unreal Scripting, you can refer to another book by Packt
Publishers called “UDK Game Programming with Unreal Script Beginners Guide”. As
it stands, Doran’s book is more of a refresher course for experienced
programmers, and is aimed more at beginners who want to learn more about the
power that the Unreal Engine possesses.
You can buy the book here:
Saturday 3 August 2013
The Apocalypse
A Concept Art of post apocalypse. Matte painting done using photoshop.
