Hey!
[FONT=comic sans ms]TLDR: We are poor students, we want to make a game over the next year or so, we are noobs, got any advice? ty.
1. Background and general info
We are a team of about 9 university students and we are in the planning phase of a one or one and a half year game project for our finals. Most of us have some basic experience with Maya + Unity already, two of our artists have worked for a few hours in Unreal and I have followed a bunch of tutorials. But we are basically noobs here, so any advice is very welcome!
First of all, I hope this is the right thread for this topic. If not, please notify me where else to put it 
Long answers are not necessary, links to websites or other forum posts that you find useful are perfectly fine. We are grateful for any help!
Please keep in mind though that we are students, so every bit of money we have to spend is cut off our personal food budget, and we like food very much.
Game
Right now our plan is to create a (single player) third person hack and slash type action game in a fantasy setting. (doesn’t sound too creative, I know but we gotta start somewhere)
2. Tools:
We are using the latest version of UE4 and will be switching to 4.20.0 for Niagara asap.
Maya and Blender are our tools for 3d models (we might get access to Zbrush at some point, but that is not yet confirmed) and Substance Painter for materials.
For project management we’ve been using Trello for now (though Hack’n Plan might also be an option) and we use Google Docs for documentation.
As Source Control we used Git with Source Tree over Bitbucket for previous Projects, but a friend of mine told me that Perforce might be the better choice for unreal, so any thoughts on that?
**3. Question time!
Plugins**
I’ve noticed that there are a lot of Plugins in UE4, some of which are enabled by default, some which are not. I’m wondering, are there any good ones that we should en-/ bad ones that we should disable? Are there any great tools on the marketplace that we should definitely get that are not too pricey / free?
Code
What about Blueprints vs C++ coding? I grew to like Blueprints a lot, being somebody who prefers visuals, though I can see that C++ is very powerful and might be a better choice in some cases.
API
In UE4s Trello I see that Vulkan support is pretty high up there, are there any news when it will arrive, or thoughts on if or how we should implement it?
Animations
Mixamo was the website where I got animations for some tutorials, but we have access to a kinda outdated but working motion capturing setup (2010ish with 10-12 cameras). Are there other websites you can recommend, or do you have experience with mocap and think we should use that?
Legal
We are mostly using non commercial student versions of the tools, so we will not be able to sell the game anyway. Anything else we have to think about? Like being able to put it online for free, taking donations (e.g. via Patreon or else) or other monetary support?
I will keep you updated, and I will probably stream most of my dev stuff on Twitch.
That’s about it for now I think. Thank you for reading through this! I’m happy to clarify anything I didn’t specify, or elaborate enough. And lastly thank you for any help! You are great!
Best regards and have a nice day!