Creating Game Actors

Game actors are the main elements of video games; they are controlled by either players (player actors or player characters) or AI controllers (non-player characters). A game actor may be represented by either a skeletal mesh (a warrior character, for instance) or a static mesh (a spaceship, for instance). The interactions between various game actors make up the gameplay.

This chapter will mainly guide you in creating your own player character (PlayerAvatar) for Pangaea. You will start by creating the animation instance class in C++, and then based on it, you will create the animation blueprint.

For the new animation blueprint, you will add the State Machine and define the states’ animations. You will also set up the character’s visual display in the character blueprint, define user inputs, and write code to implement the player controller and control the character states via the parameters defined in the animation instance class.

Once the...