Learning Unreal Engine Game Development: A step-by-step guide that paves the way for developing fantastic games with Unreal Engine 4

This book was a lot shorter than I expected, after only my second evening with this book I noticed I was already 3/4 of the way done with it. Is that bad? Not really.Joanna did a great job of introducing you into Unreal Engine. It answered a TON of questions I had and showed me how to do everything to get me comfortable to designing my game. All of the vocabulary I didn't know I needed was provided and explained in detail. I feel very prepared to take myself onto my next step of the journey and make my own game.Questions you probably are asking:-- "Will I make a game in this book?" - Not really no, but what you do make will prepare you to make your game! Seriously you will be ready to dive in head first.-- "Are there typo's and inconsistencies?" - Oh yes, there are a lot of typo's and the website doesn't have all of the errata listed yet. However I was following along closely to the content so I immediately recognized the errors and it did not trip me up.-- "I already know C++, but just want to learn an engine. Is this for me?" - Yep, me too. Read this book.

I know that this was written for a beginner, but showing me around the GUI isn't teaching me anything I couldn't learn on Unreal's site. I feel like the fir 1/3rd of the book was explaining what 3D game development was about, and the rest was a clutter of screenshots showing how to move through a GUI and they weren't even well formatted for the Kindle. This would be fine for someone who is brand new to the scene altogether (and new at finding their way through interfaces), but not a beginner book for someone who's been programming in other fields.

This book is a great starting point to UE4 and is very current as of the date of this review. The author tends to wander into "College Jargon." As I like to call it which is information that is neat to learn but will never be practical.

Unfortunately, this book doesn't cover C++ programming at all! It only covers the graphical elements of Unreal Development and talks a little bit about blueprint visual coding. Part of the reason that I chose this book in particular to purchase is that it was published with Packt Publishing, which is somewhat affiliated with O'Reilly. O'Reilly puts out great programming books, but this one isn't one of them. If the author happens to read this comment, please don't take any offense. I'm only leaving this comment and the bad rating so that other programmers don't purchase this book thinking it's about Unreal "Development." Packt should have given this book an appropriate title to avoid confusion.

This book as a simple overview of the Unreal game engine. The book is quite uneven, the first few chapters have some good introductory tutorials but in other chapters the treatment of topics is very superficial. The chapter on particles and sound is quite weak. You will learn how to generate ambient sound, but there is no information on how to customize the sound cues. While this volume is obviously oriented towards someone completely new to the system, there were a couple of topics of an advanced nature that would not be of immediate use to a new user. An example is the discussion of the shader pipeline. I did not feel this contributed to an introductory treatment of how to create materials. This space could have been used to expand on some of the introductory topics that were not discussed at all, such as the geometry editing feature.All that being said, I still recommend this book if you are new to Unreal since it does do an adequate job of introducing you to some of its important features, just know that you will need to draw on other resources to actually be able to create something useful.

Unreal Engine is a very famous game engine used to create a AAA game for a big variety of platforms. I was interested to start using blueprints visual programming that I've read in the documentation, but only with the documentation it was a little hard to me, to start with the engine in general, the editor is intimidating, but this book start from very basic game development concepts that is very useful, you can understand how to use the tools in the editor and if you have already worked with another game engine you can apply your previous game development knowledge in this game engine. The author has made a very import approach in this book, this make you feel comfortable with the engine as you will read and doing the exercises, I think that you will be able to start making very interesting projects, using materials, mesh, collisions, sounds, cameras, lights and a big variety of game features. I am very proud of the result of the book exercises, 3D game development is very fascinating, the power of this game engine is so big that a very small team could make big projects and fast. I would recommend this book for everyone who want to create games, even if you are an artist, or a C++ developer or a complete beginner, this book introduce the Unreal Engine in a very easy way that make you confident of your knowledge to create great games. Especially for me that never have worked in a #d game engine, I could say that I fell in love with this tool, I was always working in 2D game development even in another 3D famous game engine, I've never been that confident like this before, 3D for me was ever been another reality for me, when I tried it was nothing like this, a great part of any project could be done with visual tools, and the prototyping is very powerful I can say that most of my best 3D projects, and I am saying finished projects aren't 1% of the samples showed in this book, deal with 3D models only with C++ code is very hard without this editor, the work is enviable without for small team without a very good background, but after worked in this book exercises I am very confidant. I would like to thank the author to introduced me to this great game engine.

A fairly good introduction to Unreal, but with some strange chapter pairings. For example there is a Chapter covering Particle Systems and Sound but there is no connection between the particle system (In which a Fireplace was animated) and the Sound system (From which music was played). Maybe if the sounds had been the sound of a fire crackling then it would have made more sense.Another strange chapter covered both AI and Animation, which again are quite separate subjects.