Unreal Engine 4 launched to developers around the world back in March and immediately impressed. Epic’s successor to its near ubiquitous UE3, which dominated much of the last generation of game development, was designed from the ground up to offer a powerful, portable and above all accessible way for developers to create the games they want within the minimum of fuss and frustration. What’s more, it’s extremely affordable and it ships with ground-up support for the VR Headsets like the Oculus Rift and Sony’s Morpheus. Given all of this, there’s an understandably high level of interest in the platform.
Ryan Shah, Project Lead at Kitatus Studios – the devs responsible for the in-development 3D platformer ‘Super Distro’, has just released a new e-book designed to launch the uninitiated into the world of developing with UE4. The book adopts a no-nonsense, minimal jargon approach to its subject matter and aims to enlighten beginners and experienced devs alike.
After spending a little time with Unreal Engine 4 as a non-developer type, I was struck by it’s power, immediacy and simplicity. And in truth, Epic have not been frugal with it’s documentation or it’s video tutorials either. But there’s always room for more.
Ryan Shah’s ‘Master the Art of Unreal Engine 4 – Blueprints’, which introduces the reader to UE4 by walking them through the creation of 2 distinct game projects (3rd person and side scrolling platformer), is refreshingly straightforward with its language and offers up an excellent, exhaustively illustrated end-to-end guide for these simple projects. Both example games leverage the power of Unreal Engine 4’s ‘Blueprints’ and demonstrate the ease at which those in possession of only limited or no coding knowledge (I can hack, but I ain’t no coder).
For the most part game development is drag and drop, but the book does take you through some of the finer points of media production and insertion too – for example how to deal with and map animated textures for in-game portals etc. But throughout, the author doesn’t lose the reader despite tackling some relatively complex procedures.
‘Master the Art of Unreal Engine 4 – Blueprints’ is a superb way to ease yourself into the powerful and intuitive world of this cutting edge game development engine, Ryan Shah should be commended not only for his skill in delivering the subject matter clearly and without fuss but for giving his work back to the community for free. Not only that, but this is just the first of 3 planned e-books on Unreal Engine 4 development.
You can grab a copy of the e-book at one of the download links in this thread here.
