Pretty much what the title says! Just a newcomer about to start putting my imagination to a realization. Any tips or anything else is appreciated, Thanks!!
I focused too much on content assets. A lot of new assets are better, thus I spent time implementing stuff, sorting it, optimizing it - then with newer assets in the end I replace previous content. Another thing was that I started out trying to design the game world from the start, working on a huge map, setting everything up, optimizing the landscape designing a lot. Though all the work with assets was not entirely wasted, in the process I teached myself Unreal Engine, Blender, and other software, and how to setup materials, optimize scenes, NPCs etc.
So while I wish I had started out smaller, all the time I spent working with an overly complex scope from scratch helped me to obtain the required developer skills.
The best advice I can give someone who is new to UE game development, start small (small starting landscape, few characters maybe even default), focus on the fundamentals, the game mechanics.
- Start using C++ from very beginning. I thought that i will learn unreal api (and philosophy) by doing blueprints, then i just transfer over to C++ when i need to (i know non unreal C++). It is not that easy. So i kind of wasted some time with learning blueprints first.
- Buleprints are great for small tasks, anything that can fit on single 4k screen is fine in blueprints. Anything bigger than that, you should use C++. It is matter of maintaining code, in bigger projects what you save up on developing time (in blueprints) you lose later on code maintenance.
- Do not worry about assets at beginning, just buy some from marketplace, make prototype. In early stages assets are for you, to keep your marale up, to have some feeling about how game should look. And that is it. Get minimal assets that let you feel style of game
- Scope. When people write that your open world, survival, mmo, zombie fps, is huge project, at least stop and think about it. My advice is start with something very very small. Get 8bit game emulator (Atari, C64, spectrum) and go hunting for very simple games. Find one you like and recreate it in unreal. Then release it on ios, android, steam. And then you will have idea of how much work it is to make full game. Do not start with mmo.