Double-click on the HelloUnrealBP to open it. Now, you should be able to see our spherical friend front and center within the Viewport. You will also notice that the components we added to our Hello Sphere can be found in the Components panel and as variables in the My Blueprint panel. This is so that we can get references to our components within our Blueprint Graphs.

Our goal is to have it, so we can approach our Hello sphere and the 3D text will change from Hello World to Hello Player. To do this, we are going to need to add another component, work with the Blueprints Event Graph, and utilize an Event.

The first thing we need to do is provide a volume we can use to detect other overlapping actors. To do this, we need to add a SphereCollision component via the Add Component button in the top-left corner of the Blueprint window. Do this now, and name it SphereCollision. With the new component selected in the Components panel, you should be able to see...

We are going to create our Barrel Hopper project the same way we created our Hello World project. Load the UE4.11 clients and create a new project that is a Blank Blueprint project titled Barrel Hopper. For this project, we are going to need a few things. We are going to need a Character that can move around and jump, a camera that provides us a side on view, barrels that can spawn and will despawn the player when collided with, and a level for all of these elements to exist in.

We are going to be creating our first UE Character. To construct our character, we will create a new Blueprint that inherits from the UE4 UCharacter class. UCharacters are designed to be possessed and controlled by various controllers while utilizing UE character movement and physics backend. As UCharacter is at the bottom of the UObject hierarchy, it is the most developed of the objects, inheriting all of the parent object's public or protected functionality. The relationship between UCharacters and the engine will be described in more detail in Chapter 4, Unreal Engine, C++, and You.

Before we create the character, we need to set up our file hierarchy in the Content Browser so that our assets are organized in a logical manner. To create folders simply right-click on the folder hierarchy on the left-hand side of the Content Browser panel and select New Folder. Create a folder now titled Barrel_Hopper, and within that folder, create one titled Character. Every...

Game Modes in Unreal Engine are a set of instructions that inform the engine which objects to use for things such as the players default pawn (default character to use), the game rules, and what state objects to use for processes such as HUD, Player states, and Game states. We will not only be creating custom game modes but also custom objects for each of the game mode classes. To create a game mode, simply open the blueprint wizard by right-clicking on the appropriate content browser folder and choose to create Game Mode Blueprint.

As we are creating a new category of objects, I would also advise creating a Game_Mode folder in our content browser. Name this new game mode BH_GameMode and save it within the new Game_Mode folder. When you open the game mode blueprint, you will be presented with the standard Blueprint window. You will notice that this object does not have many components, only itself and a default scene root. This is because game modes will...