What should be the next step from here?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
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Just as the title asks.

I am a beginning user of Unreal Engine 4, and I now have a very, very basic knowledge of UE4’s UI interface, much thanks to Paul Kind’s “Your First Hour with Unreal Engine” course, and two of Mathew Wadstein’s introductory courses, both of which are included in the “Getting Started with Unreal Engine” learning path. I also got a very beginning knowledge of Blueprints with Wes Bunn’s “Blueprints - Essential Topics”.

I did take Sjoerd de Jong and Mario Palmero’s Unreal Engine Kickstart for Developers, and while it was very informative and gave a very good, very broad overview of UE4, I’ve been looking for more hands-on courses, similar to Paul Kind’s “Your First Hour…”. I believe when it comes to Unreal 4, I think students would learn best and most if they actually begin to build a little something, and then interact with and modify it. Paul Kind’s class just opened my eyes and interest so much more, and I’ve been looking for similar courses since. There really should be more classes like that. (I think I’ve heard a saying that goes something like, we remember 20% of what we hear, 40% of what we see, but 80% of what we do.)

The farthest I can say I’ve gotten thus far is I know how to make it like so, through Blueprints, that a point light comes on above an object when the player character approaches close enough to that object, and the light turns off/goes away whenever the character moves far away enough again. But I don’t know what would be a good next step from here. And as someone who mostly wants to get into game design, and perhaps use UE4 for other ideas and projects in possibly other industries as well, I’ve been really hard pressed to find courses on the Unreal Learning Portal that I feel might suit my needs.

I really wish there was much more structure in the whole Unreal Learning Portal community. Like, if users want to get into game design, there are specific courses that are listed that are geared towards that. If other users want to get into architecture and engineering, there are specific course tailored to those. If they want to get into automotive, product design, or film and television, there are sets of courses for those also.

But since Unreal is now being used for other industries besides entertainment software, I wonder if that is at least partly why there is a lack of industry specific courses and tracks in the portal. This is not like, say, Full Sail University, where one can choose to specifically go for a Game Design program of some kind, and the whole course track is specifically tailored to that.

Does Unreal/Epic Games have a certificate program of some kind, where said certification indicates that student has demonstrated a certain level of skill in that industry/avenue/pathway, etc.?

At the time of this writing, I’ve been using UE4 for about a month, and while I got to a decent start, and it didn’t feel as bad starting completely out as I though it might be, mostly thanks to Paul Kind’s course (thanks so much again, Paul, by the way), I felt like I’ve just plateaued and remained stagnant for the last handful of weeks, not having been able to find anything that could teach someone something new that they would find useful.

Any ideas?..

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You’d need to start working on a project. I’ve found that learning works best when you’re actually applying it, so you start a project and when you get to something that you don’t know then you do research and figure it out. Just doing tutorials can often result in forgetting what you were trying to learn.

As far as certification, there isn’t any, stuff like this is very subjective and certification tests can’t test that.

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Ok, but a project of what kind, though? Of course, I’ve started a few very small ones on my own, mostly to get more familiar with the interfaces, materials, textures, meshes, etc., as well as to try to apply what (I thought) I have learned, but it’s not like I am shipping anything officially yet.

I’m so sorry, but I don’t think my question was answered. I seek to get an idea of what would be the next good or useful thing to learn, at least, from what I said I know and can do already. I’m not sure exactly which direction to go from here, or what’s the next functionality I should pick up and begin learning. For instance: Alright, so I said I know how to make a point light appear upon approach, and disappear/turn off when the character moves away. So then, what’s next? What would be a good thing to learn after that?

That’s why I was hoping some here in the forums and community would chime in. The current offerings of courses on the Unreal Learning Portal, at the moment, seem to not have that much variety.

I’ve heard some colleges and universities are currently offering some courses for free while mostly everything is still under viral shutdown, even gaming related courses. And a few of those even have the option to obtain a certification upon completion of certain objectives, such as this:

I might even consider this course that a friend of mine gave me the link to and try it this fall, as both a supplement and something separate to my own studies of Unreal 4, if I feel I’m not finding what I’m seeking in the Unreal portals.

There’s no certification with Unreal? Truly? How else can students have an official accreditation and acknowledgement of their skill and what they have accomplished? I find this hard to believe; it is simply just appalling…

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Only you know the answer to that question. What are your goals? What type of games do you want to make?

Usually, people start making small games or some parts of them, like pong or space invaders. Or they take some template, like FPS, and work from there, adding more stuff and functionality - different projectiles, more guns, grenades, shields, hud, pickups, …

You tell me. There is no good answer to that. It all depends on what you want to do next.
Do you want to change the light color and intensity depending on your distance to it? Control its parameters with UMG? To be able to hold it and use it like a flashlight? To use it as a way to distract a guard? To make a lightshow?

Their goal is not variety. Is only to show you some of the engine capabilities.

The internet is full of learning materials. For example https://www.virtushub.com/game-dev. have vids on several types of games step by step.

So, the question is: what do you want to do?

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Companies don’t values those types of certifications because they don’t indicate how well you know how to use the software. If you want to learn programming then you can get certifications for that and that is definitely useful. Certifications often test things like knowledge of the UI which doesn’t really matter, employers want to see your portfolio of work, they don’t care if you know all of the names of the buttons.

As far as what to do next, I’m guessing the reason that you’re learning the software is because you want to make games–so make a game, you must have some kind of game idea you want to do. I suggest something small to start off with since you’ll be learning along the way, so for example don’t try to make a big MMO or something like that.

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As others said before, start working on your own game. You can try remaking one of your favorites, or a popular game. Even if you don’t finish the project, you’ll learn a lot through the process.

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But even the smallest and simplest of games would be arduous to make for a complete beginner to even start learning. Something as small and simple as pong would take months and months. And worse yet, there is nowhere that explains step by step what to do, where to go, what to bring up, etc., on the UE4 interface to start making such. To put in into perspective, even what I know already so far, I mostly had to teach myself to get more familiar with them. Doesn’t that say something about the community and content available around here? whatever it is, I don’t think it’s very positive.

So they have UE4 free to download for anyone to begin creating, and yet provide pretty much no help as to how to get started, where to go next, or how to proceed depending on one’s goals. Yeah, that’s really swell. That’s like saying someone gives you a whole garage full of equipment, tools, and parts, but they ask you to build a car or truck all by yourself without any previous automotive knowledge.

I think I did find a JRPG template project on the free part of the Unreal marketplace not long ago, and I did download it myself. But what’s not to say it would take an indefinite amount of time to dissect and learn the blueprints and other parts of that? And even if I could import assets from that sample project into another project, I would still have to know how every minutia works.

I know of course I cannot make such a big, intricate, detailed world right away. But no one should have to break their back trying to learn even how to make a bare bones game of pong or pinball.

Cleric, I just checked out that link actually, and it looks rather interesting and promising. I’ll probably look into them more next, thank you. These are the kind of resources that I wish we have more of right here on the Unreal and Epic websites. Hopefully they can provide a little more direction and guidance, especially when much in the Unreal Learning Portal could not.

I am grateful for everyone here for their input, but there’s no doubt that there is a long, grueling path ahead of me (and so many others) regardless. They say that 3D development is a growing and in-demand industry, and they try to invite many new aspiring developers and content creators to get on board, but once they are, they’re left completely to their own with just about no guidance at all. Something has to be done about these, and if these conditions do not improve soon, they could lose so many people with so much potential and possibly a lot of great ideas. I am very, very, disappointed with the Unreal and Epic communities right now… …

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I have no idea what you talking about. If there is one thing that is not lacking in UE4, are step by step tuts on how to make game type X. Here is a list that to took me just a couple of minutes to compile:

Pong:

Tetris:

Space Invaders:

Generic Space Shooter:

Endless Runner:

And more, and more, and more.

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Cleric, I’ve noticed, however, that quite a few of these other YouTube video tutorials are just a little dated. They’re from 1 or 2 years ago or so. So if they’re using an earlier version of Unreal 4 as opposed to the current 4.25 (at the time of this writing), there might be ever so slight differences even in some of the panels and user interfaces.

For instance: In one of Rob Brooks’s videos in his Shmup tutorial series (Unreal Engine 4 SHMUP / Space Shooter - #07 Level Creation and Bounds - YouTube), at about 6:03 in, there’s a portion in his details panel that allows one to change the color of that material. But that section never appeared in my corresponding details panel. Now I don’t know if this really is because of a difference in Unreal versions, or if I accidentally disabled something else somewhere and just cannot get it back, but it is something I noticed.

I at least got the main functionality of the player ship’s controls correct, which was probably the most important thing. I just substituted the materials for the walls as something that was already included within the set that was a different color. I’ve been trying to follow each video down to the letter, so I certainly expect it to at least operate the way the instructor intended it to.

Having said that, some more words to beginning developers out there. This takes time, patience, and hard work. A LOT of it. I would say thus far that scripting/programming seems to be the hardest and most detailed part. I didn’t know how much Blueprinting/coding it would take to even just generate a small animation of the player’s ship appearing on screen when the game begins. I find myself having to pause the video every few seconds so I could replicate exactly what the presenter was doing. An 11 or 12 minute tutorial could take well over an hour to get through.

I’m hoping that in time the more I do/expose myself to material like this, the more I would become familiar with it and things would make more sense as to why it has to be done the way they are. But right now, it’s like trying to run in quicksand. At this rate, one would die of natural causes before they come remotely close to completing their dream project(s).

I don’t know how professional developers do it. And even then, they probably only sleep like 3 hours a night.