I did forget to mention this in my post, so thank you for mentioning it, I know that the staff that Epic Games DOES actually have, is working very hard, and none of us would be here using Unreal Engine without their hard work. If it is truly the case they can’t find enough people to work for them, I think it would actually benefit them to discuss this openly with the community, it would actually benefit them to be more transparent about this because the community may be able to help reach out and find new hires. Our success depends on Epic’s success and in the long term Epic’s success falls on our success(although in the short term Epic may not realize that since Fortnite has helped them a lot).
Right now I feel like Epic is not communicating this well enough to us and so some of us feel shafted with lack of support, due to not enough staff. The transparency would help also because I don’t want to go by journalist reports only for this information, but in this case it’s all I have to go by, so I will say this, if it’s true that most of the people being hired are contractors and not safer permanent positions then this is likely the exact reason why they can’t find enough new hires. Again if this is true why do all the new hires have to be contractors? Even though they have enough money they are not willing to spend it on hiring non contract workers? Clearly this would be a big reason if it’s true, as people want to know they have job security.
Yes, communication sucks if you’re a solo or small indie who have no direct contact with Epic (UDN, conferences, evangelists, meetings) or you don’t interact with other experienced teams. Being based in Warsaw, quite successful gamedev city, makes these things a lot easier.
That’s what people are discussing a lot here, inefficient communication between Epic and “public”.
However, I’d strongly disagree with one of your statements. Let’s talk about it.
Nobody has been hired or trained for upgrading project to the new engine version. If there many programmers working on the project and somebody changed the engine’s code in a significant way, he or she performs merging. Smaller changes can be handled by whatever person dealing with general project management.
Blueprints usually require minimal effort since you can’t modify engine in blueprints
Issues with assets can be tricky, but in the case of UE4 the most problematic are Early Access systems like Niagara. That’s the reason why Epic is very slow with marking a new system as mature.
The same rules applies to upgrading engine as to any other development task. You stumble upon issue, you solve it.
If you know how the engine and tools work it makes your life easier every day. This is probably “the training” you’re thinking of, so I kind of agree with you here.
If you don’t know engine inside out and you don’t have the opportunity to learn from experienced devs on a daily basis, I’d push for better communication and docs. For instance, there were few great talks about blueprints and asset optimization during Unreal Fest Prague a month ago. Still, they didn’t post any footage…
I don’t think it is an issue. The game Sea of Thieves was made in UE4.10 and we were already at 4.18 at that time and this didn’t prevent them to have a game launched. They did made from source and added fixes released later during development, so it was their specific branch lets say.
If someone would start doing a game today (day zero) they could start by checking if there is any UE4 release that would have everything they need in first place, then check if the most important aspects which matches their game style and mechanics are compromised by any bugs. If there are bugs, they would check which is the planned release of those fixes. Also, it would be interesting checking new techs (ie Niagara) and when that would become matured and you can expect that will become a solid tool, since it is in tests for long, it will just take more time because the recent realtime ray tracing included recently otherwise it would be released already.
The engine, as it is, is only part of the equation on producing a game. There is so much more work besides that: models, texturing, environments, and all of these are not affected by any engine bug considered a showstopper.
