Game Development with Unreal Engine 5 Volume 1: Design Phase

Dive into the heart of game development with Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), the latest revolution in creating immersive and visually stunning game worlds. Crafted to encourage your imaginative and inventive skills, Volume 1 of this two-part guide stands as a crucial tool in your journey towards developing incredible video games with UE5 and serves as a transition into the programming dimensions of game creation with C++ featured in Volume 2.

Blending artistic mastery with technical prowess, you’ll journey from the basics of UE5’s environment to creating expansive landscapes with procedural content generation and combining materials for lifelike terrains. Discover the power of Quixel Bridge and Megascans to bring realistic textures and models into your projects, and master Nanite for rendering complex scenes with cinematic fidelity.

You’ll also learn to create dynamic lighting and shadow effects with Lumen, enrich your game’s atmosphere with sophisticated particle systems using Niagara. Then integrate characters and adversaries into our worlds, making them come alive with interactive elements. From designing large open landscapes to implementing advanced visual effects, Game Development with UE 5, Volume 1 is your gateway to elevating the visual appeal and interactive experience of your game.

You will:

• Sculpt vast, open worlds with UE5’s advanced landscape tools and Heightmaps.
• Construct highly detailed environments with Nanite, achieving unparalleled visual quality without sacrificing performance.
• Introduce dynamic global illumination with Lumen, crafting stunning lighting and shadow effects that respond to changes in the game world in real-time.
• Implement Real-Time Virtual Textures to significantly enhance texture streaming efficiency in large-scale environments.
• Use Procedural Content Graph to populate your game worlds with dynamic, lifelike vegetation that adds depth and realism to your landscapes.
• Explore Niagara’s powerful visual effects system to create complex and captivating effects that elevate the aesthetic appeal of your game.

Dr. Tiow Wee Tan is an Associate Professor at Department of Game Department, Inland Norway University of Applied Science (INN), Norway. He is also serves as the Course Co-ordinator for the Augmented and Virtual Reality Add-On Program at the Game School.Tiow Wee’s interests revolve around the development of Extended Reality (XR) for cross-disciplinary enterprise application. He was actively participated in projects on Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligent (AI) for gaming. Some of his works focus on the utilization of AR & VR technology within games engine; the creation of hybrid version of AR and VR research application for healthcare, art, and tourism; and the exploration of cognitive aspects in human-computer interaction environments, integrated into neural network systems.