I’m a designer and always wanted to create a multiplayer coop game but I have absolutely no skills in code related questions. So I had a look at the unreal engine 4 and especially the blueprint system looks very promising. After watching a few tutorials on youtube things became really interesting. Blueprint seems to be very powerful but I still have doubts if it can be used to realize even complex and advanced games. Don’t get me wrong because I know that this question is quite generic but is there anything, that can not be realized with blueprints? I’d like to figure out if blueprint can be used INSTEAD of coding or if it’s only some kind of addition to get some things easier for designers?
Is it possible to create a whole (complex) game without any single line of code? (This game could inlude aspects like: cooperative gameplay, inventory, character skill system, intelligent cover system like in GoW or SC: Blacklist, character editor, built in level editor, online highscore, loot system, random level generation system…)
One thing you may find is that you cannot alter some in-built behavior without accessing its guts in C++; fortunately, BPs are powerful enough to get around this by reconstructing the behavior IN THE BP and then modifying it.
By way of example, there’s a part of the CharacterMovementComponent which orients the player’s facing direction to their direction of movement. I wanted to slightly tweak this behavior (so the player was oriented within 180 degrees but still knew forward and backward movement apart), but could not do so as the CharacterMovementComponent’s inner workings are all handled at the code level.
My response was to disable this piece of the CharacterMovementComponent, then rebuild its behavior from scratch inside my character BP (using ultra-basic BP functions like making and breaking vectors and rotators and then altering and rebuilding them) so that I could alter it. This worked flawlessly.
Point being, BPs don’t give you access to all of the inner workings of the code you might like to get your hands on, BUT if you’re clever you can usually rebuild that portion of the code directly from low-level BP nodes to effectively “translate” that functionality into something you can muck around with. At least that’s been my experience.
