Finding Tutorials

General Tutorial & Course Discussions
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Hi everyone,

I’m currently looking for tutorials on learning Unreal Engine. Although there’s quite a lot of content available online (both paid and free), I haven’t yet found anything that really helps me get started effectively.

I have very limited experience with coding—I recently retired from the military and would like to dive into visual scripting using Unreal’s Blueprints.

The tutorials I’ve found so far show how to use Unreal Engine but don’t really explain how everything works under the hood. They mostly focus on instructions like “click here and here to achieve this result” without explaining why I’m adding certain components or how different elements interact with each other.

So, my question is: does anyone know of any good, preferably free tutorials that focus on understanding the concepts and mechanisms of Unreal Engine, rather than just following along with clicks? Eventually, I’d like to start making small games, and I have plenty of time and motivation to learn everything necessary to achieve this goal.

Thanks in advance!

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Hey there @FallenReaperQc! Welcome to the community! Many learning resources focus on getting something functional built more than digging into the nuance, as most learners are also just trying to develop their project. If you need more technical information, you can narrow the scope down to specifics and I can always help find more specialized resources. Some examples of slightly less surface level resources outside of documentation:

Networking Compendium by Cedric Neukirchen:

Mathew Wadstein explains how nodes work without digging into the source:

Tom Looman goes over game optimization and C++ a bit deeper than most tutorials:

Disclaimer: One or more of these links are unaffiliated with Epic Games. Epic Games is not liable for anything that may occur outside of this Unreal Engine domain. Please exercise your best judgment when following links outside of the forums.

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Hello!

So part of the question you are asking is to learn how to code and then how to learn the coding-environment that is Unreal, and by extension gaming/media.

The former is more a general-discipline wherein you learn a lot of the mechanisms of the computer, how to access them via software, and more importantly, how to functionally break down a problem so it can be represented by code. It’s that last one that’s really the wrinkle as not understanding design-patterns, object-oriented design, separation of concerns, etc isn’t tough to learn as you go, but it’s going to be a lot easier to end up in some pitfalls.

For this I’d recommend Alamar (Alamar's Dev Domain | Creating Unreal Engine Tutorials | Patreon, he’s got a youtube channel too). He’s got some basic Visual C going to access/implement some of the lower-level offerings inside Unreal, specifically the Game Ability System (GAS), but most of what he does is also in Blueprints. He’s also here on the forums.

Some things are only accessible in C and some things are just-done-better in C. Since BP’s are made to go along-with C, you might be OK with trying this guy’s offerings. His lessons are short, ~10-15 min, focused. As well if there is one-thing you’d likely want to learn that is based in C, it would be GAS.

For design-patterns, there are many resources but here is a good on: The Catalog of Design Patterns

Geeks for Geeks is another great resource:

Why is this important? Consider spawning a bajillion bullets. Most paths you might come across would have you just spawn them in when shot/created and then spawn-out. This is fine in theory and for some kinds of practice, but spawning/despawning is an allocation of resources and expensive at runtime. It’s better to create an object pool, like a library full of books that already exist, you can just check them in and out as you need to and not have to worry about the runtime cost. You pay up front in memory & organization and how you will ultimately tell your proggy how to do what it does, but it’s a better-overall method to managing, well most things you need a lot of… :smiley:

As for Unreal, there are lots of multistep courses around making game-type X or Y, I assume you can search for what you need, but otherwise these are on my good-list:

Materials/graphics are a popular topic as well:

Overall, to learn the editor is a work in progress, go where you need to. Some tips:

  • control-X/control-Y redo/undo are fairly reliable so if you bork something up, you can like back out
  • you can enter maths into a lot of the slider-values like entering 5+2/5 and having it resolve to whatever
  • bother to learn the short-cuts, even if you only use a few, it will save you time. learning the editor is about working-efficiently
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