I am a new developer and I’m trying to make my first video game. I am very excited, but the task itself is extremely daunting. The amount of things that can go wrong are immense, but I’m going to dedicate my time to this anyway. I believe it will be a great learning experience and if I can make my game, I would be able to walk away with pride.
Anyway, I was wondering if you guys have any tips for a newbie. I’m going to teach myself and I have already read through the manual and some video tutorials. Most of it is pretty complicated and I don’t really know what half of the stuff really means, but I will over time.
Do you guys have any suggestions for video tutorials (other than the ones by Unreal) on how I can learn the tricks of the trade? Maybe some blueprint guides so that I can make sense of what I need.
My game won’t be too complicated, all it needs is a main menu, a few cutscenes, a level selector, one talking NPC to guide the player, and level designs. I estimate that the player can complete this game within 5 minutes.
With these elements in mind, could you help point me in the right direction?
I would suggest not to overwhelm yourself. While what you want to do, as mentioned above, is relatively simple, I suggest learning how to do small things with no real end goal. A good place to start is go through each of the project templates that Epic provides and go through each blueprint/graph that is there. Understand how they lay out their graphs and figure out what each node is doing. If you don’t understand a tool tip from a node then Google “UE4 (node name).” Change some of the variables that are plugged into nodes to see what different responses you get. Simply, just play around with it and see how you can effect that base project. Then, move on to the next template and do the same thing.
Going through these, messing with it’s variables and functions will help you not only learn what each thing does but allows you to physically see how altering them affects the way they act in the game. The nice thing(s) about the templates is if you totally screw something up and can’t recover, you simply delete it and start a new template, nothing lost. They also are essentially small games that can be played (you interact with the world via some character or object type.) There are many advanced things you can do with UE4 but until you get elbow deep into some basic code and functionality, you will cause yourself to pull your hair out as well as get frustrated which increases the odds you will give it up.
Good luck and welcome to the community! I’m always amazed at how good and helpful this community can be. Don’t give up and realize that no matter how advanced a programmer is ** BUGS HAPPEN ** so don’t get too frustrated and have fun!