I have been using a YouTube series to build my third person game but I feel like I’m not really learning Blueprints rather just following someone else’s actions. If each video in the series I follow gets 30,000 views then there are possibly 30,000 other people with the same blueprints and animations as me which means I would have to go back and remake all the animations and assets used in the youtube series. Those who are experts in the unreal engine blueprints system probably didnt just watch youtube tutorials to learn it. I dont have any usable programming experience so I am uncertain of the best route to learning the blueprints system for my game.
Tutorials are a great jumping off point before you go do it yourself, but the term “tutorial hell” exists for a reason.
Be careful, and try to aim for more specific tutorials- learn through tutorials that “go over” rather than “teach”.
Mathew Wadstein’s tutorials are an amazing example of this- he’ll go over nodes and show you how you could use them in a way where you actually learn the nodes rather than just what a cluster of them would eventually end up doing.
Similarly to Mathew, PrismaticaDev is a great channel that teaches this way. While Mathew covers UI & blueprints, PrismaticaDev covers materials, particles, and animations. Kinda like Yin & Yang.
Even if you have absolutely no idea how to even approach something (meaning you can’t break the problem down into smaller pieces), I highly recommend trying to avoid videos until you’re experienced- seemingly paradoxically. Try to aim for written tutorials or look on the forums for others who were stumped on the same thing you currently are.
It’s extremely easy to follow a video tutorial without learning anything when you’re shown exactly where to click- it’s also very common for those types of overarching video series to be sparse on detail, ironically.
With a written tutorial, the connecting pieces are normally omitted for the sake of not turning a 10 minute read into 10 hours. You’ll have to connect the pieces, but you need to understand it to do so- you might have to re-read a section or two, but you’ll have a better understanding by the end.
And if nothing works, you can always just ask another question here.
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This is near impossible to answer in a general way that’s applicable to everyone. It depends a lot on how you (whoever reads this) learn best. Whether that is by following tutorials, signing up for some kind of school/education or courses or just going in blind simply trying to get things working.
As for blueprints, they are a decent language to start in my opinion. They have the advantage that they typically do not allow you to do anything harmful. For example you won’t crash if you try to access an invalid object or an array out of bounds and instead get a nice error/warning in your log instead. Although that doesn’t mean any code you call from blueprint is safe, you can still crash the engine. You’ll likely end up using blueprints anyway even if you write larger, more complex, performance critical or systemic code in C++ later. So learning them is definitively not a waste of time. While blueprints don’t teach you more low level things like memory management, platform/OS abstractions, etc. they should give you a pretty good general understanding of programming languages as well which will help you a lot if you are going to learn another language. If you manage to learn one language you can pick up and learn another one much faster.
My personal experience with tutorials is that I just end up reproducing and following the steps shown or described. But without actually learning the reasons why the steps were necessary or why certain design decisions were made. I started with little to no coding knowledge back in Unreal Tournament 3 unreal script days. To get me started with the editor user interface and controls I actually used some tutorials that showed how to create particle effects, materials and maps. The script side I basically learned by simply doing it: Trying to build the things I wanted to do. Most of these were small things, so limiting the scope and expectations when you start out is very important as well. The forums were extremely helpful answering any questions and trying to solve problems we encountered together. It was certainly enough to get me hooked for game development until this day.
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