Unreal Engine best way to learn?

Hello! My name is Constantin, I’m 17 and I’m from Romania… I’m new in development but I want to learn to make a game and fast. I have a competition in my country in May and I wanna win… I know that if I make the game that I have in head I will win pretty easy. The game needs to have a gameplay around 20 - 30 minutes. Where should I start? A structure that I have in my mind is:

  1. Learn to make a map, maybe stuff’s around the map.
  2. Make some characters
  3. Animation.

and next I don’t really know. Can somebody help me? Please?

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/ - This might as well be considered a bible. Study the hell out of it.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Videos/ - These are helpful as well.

This is one of the best intro series to UE4 - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSlkDq2rO1t7eEyfF8eiTsGGGtFOBz1vb

It can be a story game like one of telltale games or anything.

May 2017.

Hello, I am Arjun and i am passionate about developing gaming and currently learning unreal engine with offline as well as online. Everyone wants to best resource to learn their skills and posted in forums, I recommended you go Learn Unreal Engine - [2023] Best Recommended Unreal Engine Tutorials | Hackr.io here is lots of tutorials.

Hopeful this may help you.

Ages ago when Unreal Engine was fresh ie. 4.1, i picked very simple 8 bit era game to recreate, first choice was “Asteroids” game. I made it, then made next very simple game: pacman. Half way trough like 4th mini game i decided it is enough.

Then there was year long struggle to climb at that “comfortable level” plateau for doing unreal projects. I feelt too strong too fast and i jumped into multiplayer, that was quite messy. At that point i kind of knew whole blueprint api, so i decided that its time for C++ in unreal.

Recently i discovered (or rather i was told on this forum) that C++ does not go well with animations in unreal and that i need “glue” layer of blueprints between C++ and meshes.

Short version:

  • pick very small project you want to create, something tiny bit bigger than starting template, however do not use template, start from scratch
  • split that project into separate tasks, writing them on paper would help
  • do anything in your project every day, even if its renaming variables, or beautification of that spaghetti code, you must do something every day, or you lose interest
  • when stuck on task search on google or ask here
  • repeat until you ready for bigger things, ie. when for every small and silly game you can think of you know how to do each small task.

ps.
Making animation blueprints in unreal without knowledge of blueprints may be quite difficult.
Making levels for unreal without blueprints is again suboptimal, you can automate many things, and without blueprints you will make all that labor manually.
So learn blueprints first.