Setting Up Your Own Game

Setting up your own game in UDK is very easy. You can simply start by building off the initial UDK game example that comes with the program.

The first steps towards being able to create your own project scripts are setting up the initial directories.

Create your own subdirectory under 'Development\Src'
- Ex: Development\Src\MyGame

Create a 'Classes' subdirectory inside your game folder
- Ex: Development\Src\MyGame\Classes


The 'Classes' directory will hold all of your UnrealScript (*.uc) files. As far as I know, you cannot create subdirectories in here to organize your files. Instead, separate 'packages' can be created to layer your application. For now, I'll be using a single directory to hold everything.

The second step is to inform the engine that you would like it to start compiling and loading your custom game package. This is controlled through the config files which are stored inside of 'UDKGame\Config'.

Open 'DefaultEngine.ini' and navigate to the [UnrealEd.EditorEngine] section. This controls which packages get loaded. We'll want to add our own game packages to this as they are created. Currently we only have one so we'll add a line to load it:
+EditPackages=MyGame



Now that the engine is aware of our project, we'll have to compile our scripts. We don't have any scripts currently but this step will validate that everything is setup correctly. Open the 'Unreal Frontend' which is available from the Start Menu or run 'Binaries\UnrealFrontend.exe'

Click the 'Script' button at the top and press 'Compile Scripts'



If all goes well, you will see a line similar to the following at the bottom of your log window:
'Warning, Can't find files matching E:\UDK\UDK-2011-09\Binaries\Win32\..\..\Development\Src\MyGame\Classes\*.uc'



You can now start making your own UC classes. Remember to compile scripts each time you make a modification.