Chapter 2. Blueprints and Barrels – Your First Game

Welcome to Blueprints and Barrels! During this chapter, you will be introduced to the visual scripting system called Blueprint. This system will be your first entry point toward creating customized functionality and content, using UE4. This chapter will show you the basics of how to create and work with Blueprints to achieve the same level of freedom that any other text based scripting language can provide. You will also expand on the engine navigational skills you learned in the previous chapter as we delve into the more complicated facets of the Editor panel and how you can communicate between the different components of the engine. You will learn all this by creating your very first UE game project, Barrel Hopper.

This chapter will cover the following points:

• Creating Blueprints
• Navigating the Blueprint GUI
• How to find Blueprint functions
• Basic coding functionality with Blueprint (logical nodes, objects, and events)
• Game mode Blueprints
• Using UE4's world outliner
• Basic level creation and blocking
• Blueprint collision
• Adding physics dynamics to objects in a world
• Creating a Blueprint character
• Controlling a character through Blueprint
• Debugging Blueprints