Hello, I have a small group of friends that we are all VERY interested in studying game development. We all started with Unity and are realizing that for the ideas we have we want to make the switch to Unreal. The problem for me is that I want to be a programmer and I am just concerned about learning the blueprint system and is it worth it. It looks easy to learn( in relative terms) but I am doing this for two purposes. The first, I want to see what my group of friends can do when we combine our talents. This I am positive Unreal is perfect for however the second, I want to begine my career as a game programmer. My question is will learning Unreal and specifically blueprint give me skills that will be useful in the field and help make me a diverse programmer?
You can easily get started by using Blueprints but you should not be afraid to open the source code and read through it from time to time to see how it actually works in c++. Many tasks that take up a few lines of code turn into Blueprint spaghetti in seconds, but using c++ for some simple logic can also waste your time if you are just testing a prototype feature.
My answer is, learn both pretty well if you want to be a diverse Unreal Engine programmer and take some object oriented programming courses when you want to dive deeper into the subject.
I think you should definitely learn Blueprints because it will teach you a lot about the underlying API. Once you can do something in BP, its easier to jump into C++. So my suggestion is to learn BP first and then once you are familiar, go into C++.
You can also write your classes in C++ and expose certain functions as nodes to your artist friends to use (making it really easy for your designers / artists to build basic functionality).