Honestly I like the skilltree idea, I think it’s conceptually a really cool idea. The problem is I don’t think it would provide much value/incentive for me.
I’ve watched all of the content I’m interested in on the learning hub, but I’ve made absolutely no effort to collect badges. I couldn’t even tell you which ones I have, if any… These kinds of things seems like they would motivate achievement chasers but gamification like this is mostly wasted on me, and I suspect that may apply to most people.
I think the biggest problem with learning Unreal isn’t a lack of incentive or progression tracking, it’s an issue of scope and prerequisites. I doubt anyone can make their own game (or probably anything else for that matter) using only the content in the learning hub. In order to do anything interesting with the engine you need to have skills already, whether it’s 3d modeling, animation, rigging, math, programming… there is always something else you need, often multiple pieces. But it isn’t feasible to expect Epic to teach everybody linear algebra, introductory programming, or blender/maya/max/modo/sd/sp/zbrush and so these steps are intentionally omitted so that the scope can be narrowed to just teaching the Unreal part.
This is a reasonable approach but it also just feels like “Here’s the tools, good luck” which probably just drives people to go straight to Youtube instead of the learning hub. Although I didn’t take advantage of it I think one of the better choices you guys made with the learning hub is parternering with GameDev.tv to provide their C++ course for free because they actually make some attempt to cover basic programming concepts…
It also blows my mind that you didn’t permanently plaster “ALL ARTSTATION LEARNING CONTENT FREE UNTIL THE END OF THE YEAR!!!” all over the learning hub since you guys acquired the site. It was announced on the Artstation blog but probably never reached a lot of the users who it could have helped the most.
This is not just an issue with beginner content either, I really enjoyed your advanced materials course on the learning hub but for the most part I’ve found myself learning from other sites. A great example of this is Ryan Brucks blog, still one of the better resources out there for raymarching. My first experience with volumetrics in Unreal was courtesy of Asher Zhu’s blog. Both of these people work for Epic yet we have to hunt down their content elsewhere. I eventually just threw in the towel and made a twitter account so I could follow all of Epic’s tech artists and benefit from their occasional nuggets of wisdom that are nowhere to be found here.
I know there are a lot of challenges here, especially with deciding where to draw the line on what to teach, vetting content to make sure it is accurate and the cost of diverting people away from other tasks (I’m sure Ryan Brucks time is better served on other things than teaching people how to raytrace a distance field) especially when the benefits are not Unreal specific. But I feel those are the major issues that need to be tackled. While a skilltree is a cool concept, it just feels like the effort will be wasted when so much of what we need is basically everywhere but here.