Looking for a mentor to help me with learning the ropes of Unreal Engine

I’ve been using Unreal on a daily process for the past month, more often then not I encounter a roadblock which results in a couple of hours or days at times attempting to resolve the problem.

I am currently following a course on Udemy called The Unreal Engine Developer Course by Ben Tristem. I’ve noticed that when ever I’m told to do something in the course I find the process is usually very slow and some of what I am doing doesn’t make full sense. So I’ve decided to go past the course and develop 2 mini games during the process of the course.

One Section is a Tank Game, I want to change that into a hover tank game in which you have to bump your opponent of the battlefield.

Another Section, is a basic FPS, haven’t reached that part yet but I have big things planned where I know it’ll be extremely difficult.

So this is where I look towards the Unreal Community I’d like a more experienced person then myself to assist me with these issues and act as a mentor. For both these games and to explain concepts that seem a bit to hard to grasp at the moment.

Completely of topic this is an issue I am currently facing, Attempting to Transfer Normal Tank Controller to HoverTank - Programming & Scripting - Epic Developer Community Forums

From my experience, these difficulties are normal, I encountered a lot of them before actually getting comfortable with the engine. At some point you will really understand how the engine works and know where to search for things. Until then, just post questions here and hope for an answer =D.

As for the udemy course, the one you are taking is quite good, but if you are looking for a more straightforward one, I can suggest the one by Tom Looman, I learned a lot from both.

Honestly, I’ve tried a couple o0f the paid courses including one on Udemy, but I’ve found that what I’ve learned most from and made the most progress in my skills from are some of the free resources out there, namely tutorial videos on Youtube and information in the official Unreal Engine docs online. Everyone learns different, but I think what I’ve used that worked for me is probably pretty useful for most others trying to learn.

A good start is here: Intro to Level Creation: Overview | 01 | v4.7 Tutorial Series | Unreal Engine - YouTube

This tutorial series will take you through building a small level. Remembering how to do all the specific things he talks about is irrelevant. What makes going through this a good idea is more the general experience of using the engine. As you follow along, you’ll start to get that sense of where to look for what options. Even if you don’t remember all of what he talked about, that familiarity you’ll have started to get with using the engine will stay with you regardless. However, do try to get down a solid feel for using the position, rotation and scale tools, and for geometry editing. It might be worth looking up more tutorials on the case of the geometry editing, cause this is extremely useful to know how to do for later when you are wanting to block out your worlds.

Next try this: Intro to Blueprints: Blueprint Introduction | 01 | v4.8 Tutorial Series | Unreal Engine - YouTube

This one is focused on Blueprints. In the same vein as the first series I suggested, you goal with it shouldn’t necessarily be trying to memorize everything. It’s about going through the motions, and getting that engine use familiarity ingrained in you. With this one more than the first, you have some freedom to play around with how you have things laid out and the exact settings. When you’re dealing with adjusting simple properties of things, feel free to experiment a little and make it more appealing to you.

I can’t recommend that enough: as you use these tutorials as you’re building your skills up, make what you actually do your own. Early on it’s best to follow along exactly so you don’t get lost and are actually getting practice on the core things you need to know, but as you get better make the projects you created to follow along with the tutorials customized to your taste; the more you make it yours the better, as long as you aren’t getting lost. Don’t push it too far and try to do things that aren’t being covered necessarily, but do make your own version of things. This way you are starting to blend a sense of yourself into the process of using the engine, which I found helped me stay motivated and gave me a deeper, more personal sense of understanding to what I learned than just parroting what someone else did exactly.

At this point, it’d be a great idea to try making your own original, smaller project. If you are open to suggestion, I strongly recommend making a side-scroller (I chose the third-person one when I did this myself). You probably aren’t interested in making those kind of games in the long run - I know I’m not - but I found when I was trying to do a more complex type of project, I kept getting stuck because I just didn’t know how to use the engine well enough to make regular and noteworthy progress, which caused me to get frustrated and stuck for long time. The simplicity of a side-scroller is its virtue, because at your level of experience what’s needed to make this kind of project is definitely doable. You can get great practice using your position, rotation and scaling tools and in geometry editing as you set up platforms and get some great basic blueprints practice in setting up things like jump pads, moving platforms, gates that have switches you need to interact with to open, and the like. Come up with whatever you want, and have fun with it. Try to push yourself to come up with some basic kinds of obstacles and level design elements like what I was just mentioning. If something your trying to do feels too far out of your league, trust your gut, give it up and figure out something else you can do. If you feel like you’re close to figuring it out though and just don’t know how, push yourself to figure it out: look up, tutorials, ask questions on here and brainstorm till you get there. The important thing with that project isn’t even necessarily finishing it; in fact, I wouldn’t really worry about that. Just make sure you spend a good amount of quality time with it, and don’t move on till you’ve got a handful of new tricks you know to show for it.

As you’re getting better, one of the most important areas to build your skills in is with Blueprints. I highly recommend this series here: Blueprint Quickshot: Triggerable Light | 01 | v4.7 Tutorial Series | Unreal Engine - YouTube

A little of this will skirt the edges of the earlier BP tutorial series, but most of it will be brand new. Create your own practice level and follow along with these. If you’ve done what I suggested before now, then you should be in a great place to take what he talks about and modify it and create your own versions of what he makes with different properties. You should be in a great place now to even figure out for yourself how to make objects do certain things in Blueprints that nobody has necessarily gone over for you, just because you’ve gotten used to what some of the nodes do and have gotten a sense for where else they are useful in solving your problems. So follow along, but go nuts. You should be getting more comfortable at doing your own thing by now, and if you are, own that. At least go through the first nine videos; the rest are interesting and could certainly be useful in the right situations, but you’ll get the most out of the first nine.

At this point…start another new project. Pick a more complex type of project, plan for it to be a bigger experience than the scroller was, and plan to complete this one. Figure out what you are wanting to do, then go for it. Mostly focus on blocking out your world at first, but feel free to alternate over to creating BP’s as needed to get the feel of things more into focus. Don’t worry so much about the art stuff - Materials, etc. at first other than the most basic you need to have a rough feel for the look, like your Skybox. Continue looking up more tutorials and asking more questions on here as needed, but at this point always try to push yourself to come up with the answer before resorting to help. You might be surprised what you can figure out on your own. This is a great time to work on developing more complex BP’s, creating menus and so on. Get that project done and from there I’d say you’re rinsing and repeating on the process, moving on to bigger things and learning more complex techniques.

The above is the process I’ve gone through personally, and I’ve come a long way because of it, so it’s my recommendation.

If there’s anything specific that stumps you, feel free to ask me. Can’t promise I know everything in spite of what all I just wrote, but I’ll try, lol. Hope this helps. Good luck!

For the record, I don’t really know anything about coding. I’ve made use of Blueprints heavily to get things done as a result. If you’re favoring learning C++ over that, then I’d say replace what I said about Blueprints with the best analogues you can find that make use of C++ instead. Past that it would be beyond me to know what to recommend, honestly. I’m sure you can figure out how to work that in though.

Thanks for the comprehensive answer I really do appreciate it. The possible resources you can learn from are a lot, which makes it confusing when it comes to selecting any one course. I honestly feel pretty happy with the course I’m doing right now, I can see that all the courses you’ve recommended focus solely on blueprint, I fell that I’ve neglected blueprint and focused on C++ quite a lot.

One of the major reasons I’ve asked for a mentor is that these courses help you out and make you feel as if you’ve made plenty of progress, and honestly speaking thats true, until you decide to create a project yourself and run into hundreds of issues, solving those issues really does help but at the expense of spending a LOT of time staring at code and trying different solutions, half of which I do not fully understand. The latest issue is the hovering tank, which has stumped me now for a record 5 days, everything is on hold because of it. Hopefully, I’ll figure it out. Until then I think I’ll give some of the blueprint courses you’ve shared a shot!

It’s my pleasure. I’ve been in your position, encountered the same general problems on feeling lost outside of the tutorials, and had to figure out my way through that frustration. That’s a major reason that I didn’t just recommend specific tutorials, but recommend how you handle yourself and where you start doing your own thing as you follow along. For me personally - I can’t speak to others’ experiences - finding the opportunities to change what I could to my own preferences as I followed along with the tutorials I did, so long as what I was changing didn’t get in the way of following the major steps, really helped me feel a sense of ownership of what I was doing. Basically, making it personal made the knowledge more personal, and helped me retain it better. Hopefully if you try the same it’ll work out for you. Everyone’s different, so I’d say feel free to mix it up where the process I suggested isn’t fitting exactly for you, but I think what I went through is probably a pretty good guideline for anyone starting out that is interested in the design side.

I know C++ is important to learn and don’t discount that, so I say power to you and do make it a point to learn that, but I do recommend learning the Blueprints just so you can approach design from that angle. For me, I’m not an unintelligent guy but I know C++ is difficult to learn as far as programming languages go, and am already behind in life on where I’d like to be as far as learning game design goes, so I decided to focus on Blueprints because of their being more approachable and work more on learning C++ later. This way, I’m getting in a position to actually script design into my games earlier, which helps a lot on the motivation, then build up from that. I would say if you try both simultaneously, do it in blocks or something of just focusing on one for a short period, then the other. If you try to remember stuff from both at once they’re going to be competing for retention in your head, and you’re probably less likely to remember either very well as a result. So maybe if you are going to start working on Blueprints, focus on that for a bit, then jump back to C++ to learn the equivalent there for doing what you’ve just learned to do in BP’s? Something like that might work. Haven’t done that myself so it’s hard to know what to recommend, but I’m sure you can figure it out. As long as whatever process you’re using has you retaining skills and feeling good about your progress, that’s the important thing.