Visual Programming with the Unreal Development Kit

This thesis discusses the differences of programming with the Unreal Engine 3’s visual scripting tool Kismet versus traditional programming. A simple action adventure game was developed with the Unreal Development Kit (UDK) in order to gain experience with the tool. UDK is the free version of Epic Games’ game engine Unreal Engine 3. The resulting game has a mixture of a third person behind the character default camera and fixed camera angles. The gameplay is simple; the playable character can run, investigate the level, shoot and lift and push objects. The game focused on exploration and puzzle solving. The writer found programming with Kismet to be easy to get into and highly useful. It was preferred over traditional programming for beginners. The same principles of planning ahead before writing code applied even to visual programming. It was concluded that good structure to the code was very important for larger sequences in order to have readable code. For complex gameplay classes the Unreal Engine 3’s own programming language UnrealScript was preferred. The resulting opinions of programming with a visual language are of highly subjective nature and suggestions for further studies were given