Learning Unreal Engine in One Month to make a Game!

a couple months ago I made a game in a weekend with a game engine I had never used before and in this video I made a game in a month with a game engine that I had never used before okay when I put it like that it sounds like a piece of cake but I wasn't learning any old game engine I was learning the Unreal Engine it all started a little over a month ago when I randomly felt like making a 3D game and because I'm still kind of boycotting unity and gdau isn't the best for 3D I decided unreal would be a good choice the only problem is that I have have no clue how to use it so I dedicated the month of January to learn how unreal works and to make a game with it the very first thing I did was install the engine because it would be pretty hard to make a game with it if I didn't even have it installed after that box and then wait for it magic flying box so that took about 3 hours and as school as magic flying boxes 3 hours is a very long time to make something easy like that all the Unreal Engine beginners guides I watched on YouTube didn't really help at all and kind of just overwhelmed me with literally every single thing Unreal Engine does with gdau once you understand nodes you pretty much understand the engine but with unreal you need to understand actors pawns game modes controllers blueprints blueprint classes components and so much more but the hardest one by far is C++ now you'd think C++ and CP would be similar because one if you move the pluses around in the right way kind of makes a little hashtag and two you know because they both have a c in them but no C++ is like C's evil twin brother that looks nothing like him because it turns out he's adopted and not even related to C in the first place okay where was I oh yeah Orange Box and then wait for it Orange Box that moves so that took about 5 hours and as cool as Orange Box that moves is 5 hours is a very long time to make something easy like that and after realizing I spent a total of eight hours trying to make these boxes move it hit me that learning Unreal Engine may be a little bit trickier than I originally thought it would be on real engine more like on really hard tolearn engine it's clear I'm not getting anywhere trying to learn it myself and you know what they say if at first you don't succeed just pay someone money and they'll teach you how onreal engine works so that's what I did I paid $14 for a $195 Game Dev TV course on unreal the course is split up into five projects each teaching you new stuff and unreal the first project was a little firstperson shooter is game called Warehouse wreckage with this first project you learn the basics of the engine as well as coding with blueprints blueprints is unreal's visual programming language where in theory you can do anything that you can do with an actual programming language like C++ in one of unreal's default levels I made the player able to shoot these little balls to sound more professional I will from here on out call these little balls projectile tiles next I made my own level and put some materials on the walls and Floors from a free asset pack the asset pack also had some meshes so I put out some barrels and a rack and proceeded to knock them over with my projectiles after making an ammo counter and having the game restart when you run out the first project was just about done the next project is a third person platformer called obstacle assault and in the course this is where you start learning my new favorite programming language C++ the first thing I did with this game was download an asset pack which gave me a bunch of stuff to build out a level with then I did some coding in C++ to make a moving platform component this lets me attach it to anything in the level called an actor and specify how it should move for instance I made these moving platforms that move up and down and I also made some boxes that move side to side and again the benefit of components is that I coated it once and can use it for these two different things I then did the exact same thing but this time with rotations to make these rotating platforms you can attach both components to the same actor so the last Pusher box will rotate and move the last part of this project was to actually make a level with these movers and rotators but I didn't really feel like doing that so I moved on to the next project called cryp Raider Crypt Raider went into some more advanced C++ topics and after I learned them to make a gargoyle and candle that are able to be picked up and moved around by the player I just decided to move on to the next project toune tanks was a fun little project that builds off the C++ knowledge you learned from the last project it also touches on pawns and controllers which is a pretty tricky subject to wrap your head around so using an asset pack I made these little tanks and turrets and made it so you can drive around the tank then I made the top of the turrets and tank able to look where they are aiming and finally I made them able to shoot now I could have just left it like that but I like this project a lot so I finished it up by polishing it in this case polish just means particle effects sound effects screen shake and UI last last project in the course is making an incredibly generic third person shooter to kind of put everything you learned together I started making the player move around in first person and then I hooked up the animations then brought the camera back a little bit to make it third person next up I made another character to be an enemy and made it so when I shoot him a bunch he falls over and dies now it's not fair that I get to have all the fun so I made this guy follow you around and shoot you if he gets close enough finally after a bit of Polish the game and the course was all done now was this course worth it well it depends I was incredibly underwhelmed with the amount and quality of unreal tutorials on YouTube especially those that use C++ the course was also on sale for 14 bucks so in my case it was very worth it and very helpful as per most of gamedev TVs courses I do think the normal price is a bit much but they frequently have very big sales so if you want to get it I'd recommend waiting for one of those however if you'd rather not spend anything at all and only learn through YouTube videos it is definitely 100% possible but compared to Unity and gdau it's going to be a bit trickier enough Dilly dallying at the start of the video I said I was going to make a game and make a game I shall what I want to try to make is a puzzle horror game where there are these spooky statues that only move when they're in the dark the player has to solve puzzles and escape a room while avoiding these statues that want to kill you oh yeah and I have like 15 or so days left in the month to make it the first step is to make the player and get him moving around stuff like this is where unreal really shines because all I have to do pretty much is just make a child of the character class and tell it to move when you press a button doing this in unity would take significantly longer because you not only have to tell it when to move but also how to move it unreal conveniently already has the how to move part built into the engine next up is to get the statues made and other than looking unintentionally pretty sus they're working as expected it may not look that way because it's just blatantly moving around in the light but I haven't yet told it what it means to be be in the light in the first place inconveniently for me there is no super easy unreal way to do this like there was for making the character move there are a bunch of ways to theoretically go about this but the way I chose was to make an invisible light sensor these light sensors are components so they can be attached to anything in the game to see if they're illuminated and speaking of light let's turn them off now that's the spooky Vibe I'm going for but these statues are still blatantly walking right through the light and well just like everything in programming it's doing that because I told it to I really just wanted to print out to the console whether or not it's illuminated and it does that perfectly before I made the Statue freeze in the light I made sure to put a light sensor on the player and tell the statue to not chase the player if the player is in the light because if you think about it it will otherwise charge right into the light and freeze the moment its pinky toe gets lit up at first it seems like everything is working fine but there are actually two subtle issues that need a bit of fixing the first is that the statue has no idea where the light actually is until it's too late this is a problem because if the player walks out of the light on the opposite side of the light that the statue is on the Statue will immediately make a beline straight for the player and get caught in the light I turned the skylight on just to make it more obvious but it doesn't affect the light sensors at all we want our statue to be able to pathfind around this lit up area the way I did this was with the nav modifier component in the capsule component so after I place a light I adjust the capsule to where it intersects with the ground and then the nav modifier essentially usually cuts a hole in an invisible floor called the nav mesh the player can go anywhere but the statues are forced to stay on this invisible nav mesh I think it's kind of a janky solution but hey it works to better test out the next problem I'm going to need a flashlight and because I made the normal spotlights in a very modular way this was very simple anyways the second problem is that the light currently ignores any wall in its way it does this because the light sensors don't actually detect light at all all they do is act as a point in 3D space which I can do some math with to determine whether or not it's inside the cone made by the Light the fix to this is pretty easy because we just have to trace over the line made from the light sensor to the light and just double check that there's nothing in that path now before I can say I'm 100% done on the statues I need to give him a bit of a makeover I've done 3D models before on the channel so I'll go fairly quick through this first was the blockout and then the sculpt the sculpt was a bit different than what I'm used to because I had to sculpt on clothes after the sculpt I made the model much more low poly and then transferred over the details from the high poly mesh in what's called a normal map I then proceeded to texture paint it with a rocky Stone texture and finally gave it some bones to move around luckily I don't need to make any animations because the player will never actually see the statue move but I did end up making about 50 different poses for the Statue to be in after a lot of struggling I got these poses hooked up into unreal and I can say now that I'm 100% done with the statues if you take a minute to look around your surroundings in real life I can almost guarantee that the surfaces closest to you aren't just gray checkered squares so that's what I'm going to fix next very conveniently unreal has this thing called quickel Bridge which is like a little store that you can buy stuff for your games and the best part is everything is free so I downloaded a few materials and got them set up in the game there are a lot of differences between unity and unreal but free stuff like quickel bridge is in my opinion one of the most important differences in case you didn't know a few months ago Unity showed the Game Dev Community how they really only care about making as much money as possible off of your games Unreal Engine is not a company rather a tool owned by the company epic games if you've played video games at all then you've definitely heard about epic's biggest game fortnite so let's break it down Unity makes money off of unity and epic games makes money off of Unreal Engine and fortnite and because all companies are greedy Unity rips off the unity devs to make their money but epic just rips off all the parents dumb enough to have their credit card information on their 9-year-old son's Xbox who just has to buy $10 worth of v-bucks to get the latest fortnite skin remember kids only you can prevent v-bucks scams by epic providing a bunch of free stuff to Unreal like quickel Bridge shows that they're willing to buy stuff to make your games better because they've already got all the money they need coming out the Wazoo from fortnite okay back to the game I now made the lights able to turn on and off I did this with a light switch which you know works like a light switch also I have a timer that can be customized to turn the lights on and off after a specific period of time and finally I made the flashlight able to be toggled on and off by pressing F oh and I also tried to make the player fall over dead when the statue gets close enough to attack but the player just wants to show off his epic break Dan daning instead the thing is the player is just too good of a break dancer I tried adjusting a bunch of the physics simulation settings but couldn't figure out how to make it work my fix was a bit janky but basically I just freeze the player once his local z-axis is approximately orthogonal to the global z-axis oh and I also added a little you died screen to further emphasize to the player that they indeed are dead the restart level button is working fine however the main menu button currently does nothing due to the fact that I have not made a main menu yet once the main menu was done I was ready to start making some levels now usually I wouldn't show all the levels in hopes that you would go to itch.io and play the game yourself but ha funny story you see after making all 10 levels it was January 31st and because there is no such thing as January 32nd my month was over so I exported the game like I saw in a YouTube video and when I went to run the game it gave me an error after doing a bit of digging it appeared like one of my blueprint classes was corrupted or something I still don't know for certain but some guy on the internet said to fix a similar problem you have to delete some specific folders and then rebuild so I deleted those specific folders but the project didn't rebuild I did make a backup before so I have the game working fine in the editor but it still won't export you know other than that little snafu at the end I really like Unreal Engine it definitely has a huge learning curve to it especially if you're used to Unity or gdau but once once you get it it isn't all that bad even though I kind of understand it now I still think C++ is whack do I think unreal is better than Unity or gdau well that definitely depends on what you're trying to make unreal is like a toolbox filled with a bunch of tools for you to use if you plan on utilizing unreal's tools then unreal is a great choice unity and gdau give you a lot more freedom to make anything they basically let you make your own tools and use them however you want now this sounds good on the surface but with unity and gdau you often find yourself frequently Reinventing the wheel when unreal has like five different Wheels already built into the engine for you this little challenge definitely taught me a lot about Unreal Engine and I recommend trying it if you've never used it before and again if you're interested in the courses I used wait for a sale because they happen pretty frequently around the holidays for the last minute or so I feel like I should give some kind of quick Channel update so I'm back well technically I never left you see after I released my last video introducing my new big project the Unwritten Tales From The Apocalypse I was constantly working on it for like 2 months all I really had to show for those two months though was a mediocre character generator two months for that character generator really put the scale of that project into my head and I think it's a bit too big I think the idea for the game is still good and it might be easier once AI gets even better but for now just like most things I try to make it's just a bit too much for me thank you to everyone who showed support and volunteered to be a play tester but I'm unfortunately the Unwritten Tales From The Apocalypse is officially indefinitely postponed I know it's not the best way to make games but I was having a lot of fun just messing around and unreal making this game with no specific plan I also really like the concept of the game and I'll probably come back to it soon but for now I'm not going to dedicate any more time on one specific big project because whenever I do it seems to never end up working out thanks again see you soon

Channel: Will Hess

Views: 53,937

Keywords: UE, Unreal Engine, Game Dev, Game Engine, Unreal Game Engine, Epic Games, UE5, Indie Game Dev, Indie Game Development, Unreal Beginners Guide, One Month Unreal Learning Challenge, Learning Unreal, c++, C Plus Plus, C Pluss Pluss, I dont like c++, c# is better, programming, blueprints, unreal engine 5, game dev, unreal engine

Id: KHD6bymXKR4

Length: 15min 25sec (925 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 10 2024