Ultimate Game Design : Building game worlds

Building Game Worlds
152
U L T I M A T E G A M E D E S I G N
The Unreal engine is a good solution because it’s a robust, multigenerational engine
with strong game community support. Unreal technology offers a complete engine code
base and toolset for game development. Publishers/developers license or pay for the
use of the engine technology to build their games, which saves engine development
costs and, in most cases, greatly shortens the time required to produce competitive
game content.
Like I’ve said before, you can have a decent game engine with no tools pipeline, or
no tools support, and end up with a very limited ability to build in great gameplay.
The Unreal engine helps deliver in this area as well, with a detailed and powerful
tools system that gets better with each new engine generation.
In the context of our look at using triggers in this chapter to build gameplay, let’s
take a quick look at how the Unreal engine handles these events. Figure 6-6 shows the
power of the Unreal editor in setting up basic trigger properties in a clean and powerful
way. In this case, we are setting the type of actor (pawn) that will trip a proximity
trigger (TriggerType = TT_ClassProximity). So, any actor of type “pawn” will trip
this trigger. Notice all the other property and configuration choices available to the
content builder via this tool.
As you explore the various engines available for commercial game development, it
becomes obvious that some have much more extensive abilities to accomplish
gameplay construction available via their tools and scripting systems. This is perhaps
one of the most important areas to consider when choosing a game engine technology.
FIGURE 6-6
Setting trigger properties in UnrealEd