Is there an initial overridable initialisation point?

I am a hardcore programmer, and doing anything through the Unreal Editor really turns me off. Apart from anything, how do you peer review someone else’s changes? C++ code has numerous tools to provide, and comment on, the “diffs”, but how do you do that when the change is made by clicking checkboxes or changing text entry values in Unreal Editor.

Currently I am using procedurally generated meshes and my entire level is just a single instance of a single class. Eventually I will have static meshes and so on, but they will all be spawned procedurally. All of them.

I would quite like to not have a “level” at all. Ideally I would like a function, the Unreal Engine equivalent of main() which Unreal Engine will call where I can instantiate my main class and anything else I need to do. Eventually I also plan to make this a networked game, but using my own networking because I already have a login server and want to validate the login tokens generated by the login server in my game. This will mean hooking into my networking library which is much better to do during initialisation rather than in a BeginPlay() override.

Does such a thing exist or am I forced to always have a level with just a single actor in it which then forms the basis for my entire game?

I would argue that this “C++ puritan” approach is stupid and doesn’t make any sense for game development, but anyways you’ll probably find this video informative:

Create a class deriving from UGameInstance, and override its “Init” function, it will be called only once when the game is launched, the the GameInstance object wll persist until the game is closed. For the game to use your custom game instance class, choose it in “Game Instance Class” setting in Project Settings