Now, it is time to create your first Blueprint. Instead of jumping straight into a new project, I can't think of a better place to create your first Blueprint than our Hello World project. It is time to give our Hello Sphere an upgrade! The first thing we need to do is create a Blueprint from our actor. To do this, we need to select the HelloSphere actor by clicking on the Actor in the viewport or selecting the HelloSphere name in the World Outlier. This will populate our Details Panel with the appropriate options. Just next to the Add Component button, there is a Blueprint/Add Script button, click on this now:

You will be prompted to save the Blueprint we are about to create in some folder within our Content Browser. For now, save the blueprint in the Content folder directly. Name this Bluerpint HelloUnrealBP and press the green Create Blueprint button.

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 time...

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...

Now that we can see our character in the game world, it is time to get him moving! We are going to create some input events via our project settings, then receive those events in our BH_Character Blueprint. Let's start by setting up some input axis mappings and input action mappings. These mappings simply bind an input, that is, a key press or mouse change, to an axis event or action event that we can receive in our objects. Axis mappings should be used when you wish to receive varying levels from an input, these are most commonly used for analogue inputs such as joysticks and mouse movements. Whereas action mappings should be used when you wish to input from something that has no variable movement, for example, a button or key press.

UE provides a very in-depth and multi-use editor. From this editor, developers are able to create amazing and high-detail levels, the combination of editor tools present in UE4 creates a developer environment where the most limiting factor is the imagination! For the scope of this chapter, we will be using a limited tool set of the editor to act as an introduction to building levels with UE4. Each of the game projects you will create during the course of this book will require a new approach to building levels. This chapter will teach you the fundamentals of level creation and manipulation while teaching you some tricks to make position world geometry a breeze. We are going to take the default level arrangement from this:

To a more realized gameplay level, like this:

For this process, we are going to be creating a new level. To do this navigate to File | New Level and select the option default. Save this level as Barrel_Hopper_Map.