I’m a month or two into learning and using Unreal 4 and I’m just looking for other peoples beginner tips, and sharing a few of mine that have been helping me out a bunch. Interested to hear what you guys have to say. From my short time with Unreal I have these few tips to offer.
Take Notes.
I, like many beginning developers watch a lot of tutorials online, one thing that I have found helps me retain that info is to take notes and write down important points, even if I don’t look at my notes, just the act of writing it down helps me remember, a txt or word file could also serve the same purpose, I just like the feeling of putting ink to paper, plus I can make little doodles.
Print String is your friend.
The Print String node has helped me out so many times. I’ve been working on a Paper 2D game and was having issues with projectiles hitting what I thought were glitches with the Paper2D engine, put a hit event with a print string in my projectile Blueprint, and realized I was hitting the Player Character, which I had made invisible because this is an Angry Birds style game, so you’re not really controlling a player in the traditional sense. I’ve used it to figure out touch values that I needed, and countless other things, often times as simple as seeing if an event is executing properly.
Keep your BluePrints organized.
It makes everything so much easier, and it’s a good habit to get into, and one I am actively trying to improve. It also makes it easier to get help, when you can post a picture of an organized BluePrint, instead of a mess of wires and nodes going everywhere.
Analyze games that you play or have played.
While you’re waiting for the next match of Battlefield 1 to start, ask some questions.
How would I go about implementing a damage system in a vehicle that would effect handling? How would I set up a progression system?
When I play video games, which is quite a bit less since I’ve started to try and make them, I’m always trying to think about what’s going on behind the scenes, and how I could go about doing something similar. I find this to be great exercise, as turning ideas into something that someone can play and hopefully enjoy, is a lot easier if I can break it down into all the different little systems I have to set up, and that for me is easier if I can look at a game and kind of guess how they would have set it up.
That’s all the good beginner tips I can think of, seeing as how I’m definitely a beginner, but I am looking forward to hearing what others have to say.