Hey guys, so I just started using Unreal recently and I fell in love. I’m currently studying to become a game programmer at a college. I’m interested in graphics programming and want to work for a AAA company in the future. I’m reading books on computer graphics (opengl so far) but I will read about directx and many more. I still have a long learning curve to go through and its more difficult than I thought.
I was thinking of making an entire game engine and make a game from it or just a nice graphics engine and import SDKs for everything else and make a simple game for my capstone. But then I thought, what if I make something with the Unreal Engine source to really showcase my skills. Is there anything I can do related to modifying the Engine Source in some way that would blow everyone’s mind? How do I show something like that as a capstone project/game? I have a year to do my final project and am in need of ideas. Anyone?
Or is this way out of my league as a student? What do you guys think would look best to employers in big game companies?
Here are my skills: Good with C++, data structures, some design patterns. I know 3D math (vectors, matrices, quaternions, etc), physics, calculus (differentiation, integrals, numerical methods). No experience making my own engine yet but I’m currently reading a book on it and I seem to understand it. Is this totally different that doing something cool with Unreal Engine source code. Which is harder?
Before i started using UE4, i was working on my own game engine for many many years, started on DX7, migrated to DX8, migrated to DX9, migrated to DX10, migrated to DX11, added OpenGL, added multi-platform …
Its all fun, but u must be honnest to yourself. As a single person, there is just no way to keep up with latest technologies.
This is where engines like these come in handy, they are a ready-to-go package, allowing u to extend, modify …
So creating your own game engine to impress, is not the way to go, hopefully before the end of the year time u have
No company will ever ask u to write a new engine anyway, so i think u will have more success if u can show u are able to implement gameplay.
Maybe look now which companies u would like to work for, see the project they do, or the kind of gameplay u would like to work on.
Sorry for the late reply. I live in Toronto, Canada. So companies here are Ubisoft, EA, BioWare, RockStar along with many, many smaller indie companies. The thing is many people in my program (and in general I’d assume) make their final projects using Unity or Unreal. I assume since there are so many resources and tutorials online (along with tons of plugins to make things easier), making a game using these existing engines isn’t too hard of a task and employers won’t care if that’s what you did since anyone with basic programming skills can do it. I’m sure it would suffice for a smaller indie company but I’m not sure if big AAA studios would care for that. This is just my perspective but I could be totally wrong.
I just found out after posting my first message that my program co-ordinator changed the rules and we have to make a C++ engine. The only other alternative is if we are making a shippable game (with Unreal or Unity) for money. I’m not a great designer or artist so I don’t think I can come up with a cool game idea to ship it. So it seems like I have no choice but to make an engine. I could do both (engine and a good unreal game) just for experience and a killer resume. I’ve made smaller games using Unity but they’re not that great. My final year starts in September so I have to figure out something soon.
So should I just do both? Thing is I don’t know if its humanely possible to make an entire game engine, a game with it, and an awesome game using unreal by myself all in 1 year.
Everyone has his own skill, some are great designers, some are great programmers, but only very few (if any?) are great at all parts of creating a full game as a one-man-team.
So team up with people from your school (im sure thats allowed) or with people on these forums.
