Looking for an advice

Hello,

I’m looking for a more general advise. I have good amount of experience in both the game industry and offline rendering as a software engineer (10+ years). I have also a personal project that shows my skills. I’m currently working on a well known game franchise as a graphics programmer. So, what’s my problem… I would like to find a remote job after something like two years and move back to my (small) home town. There are personal preferences to live there, but also looking after a parent. It’s complicated.

I already tried remote work for a while (on VFX, not game), but it turned out to be too isolated, without enough feedback from the colleagues. I just didn’t like it. So, I have two question for people that went on that road:

  1. Is Unreal Engine good choice to learn? Up until now, I’ve worked only on proprietary software. I hate this, since when you move, it’s like starting from scratch. What I like about UE is that you get access to the source code. And since I want to continue working as a graphic programmer, this is huge plus for me. On the other side, many indies still use Unity. What are my chances to find a team opened for remote work?

  2. how do you deal with the communication issues that go with the remote work? Maybe good starting point is working with people in the same time zone (I live in Europe btw). Also, people that have time and desire to communicate (although this is something that you only figure out eventually).

What parts of UE can you advise me to focus on? What kind of tasks come up for programmers (except specific gameplay code of course).

Why not learn both? One of the advantages of learning these game engines is that there’s a need for people since there’s so many studios using them, while it will take more time to learn things, I don’t think you need to restrict yourself to one. Sometimes you have a project that you’d rather do in one engine vs. the other for whatever reason.