I have been messing around a bit with the Unreal Engine editor, and today I decided that I wanted to begin the journey of mastering making games with it.
I have figured out how to do a few things here and there just messing around and with some quick searches but it really felt a little overwhelming. It is a huge engine with tons of features and multiple built in editors. The only way to really approach something this big is one small piece at a time.
Speaking of breaking down overwhelming looking tasks, I can wholeheartedly recommend How to Fight a Hydra by Josh Kauffman. It is an awesome little book that is literally a story of a man fighting a hydra. At the same time it is a set of principles for approaching large, difficult projects. Not expensive, but filled with value.
Where Do You Start?
If you don’t have a lot of knowledge about a subject, you can’t even ask the right questions. Whenever you are attempting to learn anything, it is best to figure out as many of your unknown unknowns as you can and turn them into known unknowns.
In order to figure out what you don’t know, you will need a large amount of skimmed info on the subject to find out the broad areas you will need to cover. Reading the chapter breakdown at the beginning of a book or even skimming over a few tutorials will help out here.
So far I have come across this excellent list:
- Create and Manage Projects
- Viewport Navigation
- How to use the Content Browser
- Placing and working with objects and static meshes
- How to use BSP to block-in a level layout
- How to use static meshes to construct environments
- How to insert and use lights (directional, spotlight, etc)
- How to manage a scene
- How to insert required level objects (lightness importance volume, player start, etc)
- How to build objects to scale and proportion
- How to render the game or build all
- How to playtest from the editor
- Little shortcuts to do all of the other steps faster
And this is just stuff a beginner needs to learn. Not to mention Blueprints and / or the C++ code to make the game run.
Step One
As you will find in fighting hydras, you take everything one task at a time. So today I went back over how to navigate the viewport, following Unreal’s tutorials on their YouTube channel.
There are actually a couple of different ways to move the camera around based on your particular taste. My personal choice is using WASD to move like a video game character. This only moves the camera while holding down the right mouse button. E and Q raise and lower the camera and moving the mouse around lets you turn.
You can also hold down the left mouse button and drive the camera around with the mouse.
Alternatively, they have a Maya mode for people used to working in the Maya 3D editor where you hold down Alt and left mouse which allows the mouse to “tumble” the camera around the selected point. Selecting an object and hitting F (while holding Alt) will frame or center the view of the camera on the selected object.
I recommend watching the tutorial video for a full breakdown of viewport movement. You can join me on my journey of learning to make games with the Unreal Engine.
Keep getting wiser, stronger, and better.
p.s. There is a pretty good course on how to learn things quickly put out by Simple Programmer that is worth taking a look at.