Initial Adventures in Unreal Engine
Hi there! I hope you had a great 21st night of September.
Aside from enjoying Earth, Wind, and Fire a little extra last week, the only explicit goal I had was to finish Epic’s official Editor Introduction to learn the basics of Unreal Engine. I’m hoping that having small targets each week will lead me to learn more tangential topics as I go, instead of rushing through to finish ambitious weekly goals.
I think I landed somewhere in the middle last week! I certainly accomplished more than I planned, and I looked forward to every minute of it. I also started reading A Theory of Fun for Game Design after it was recommended to me at a party two weeks ago. I’ve learned a lot from the first third of the book, and I’ll share my takeaways when I’ve finished reading the rest!
Some starting stumbles
The intro mini course walks through the absolute basics of Unreal engine: navigating through a level, saving projects, finding assets, etc. The narrator’s voice is also super pleasant – I hope he finds a home at NPR one day.
I figured the course would be pretty straightforward, and the vast majority of it was, but I found myself really fumbling with the controls for navigating through a level. I’ve played plenty of games with WASD controls, but something about the added gestures to move through levels in UE5 just did not mesh with my brain.
I was navigating like a baby getting its sea legs.
I wanted to improve my navigation and get more hands-on experience with what I learned in the intro, so I decided to create a scene of my own. I hoped that taking my mind off of how frustrating navigation was would move the task of figuring out how the heck I was supposed to move around the level designer to some background process in my brain.
Hitting my stride
As an aside, a fact you should know about me is that I’m a glutton for assets. Asset stores are my happy place. I love them – they inspire me to dream of entirely too-ambitious game worlds, and daydream about all the interesting games I could build with them (if I only possessed the skills to do so!). When I first took a stab at learning game dev in 2020, I spent more time going through the Unity asset store than I did actually learning game development. I bought numerous Unity assets packs without a plan for how I’d use them, before I could even comfortably place blocks in a scene. I. Love. Assets.
So unsurprisingly, I had already immediately downloaded nearly every free Unreal Engine asset when I first opened the Epic Games Launcher, including many assets from the game What Remains of Edith Finch (I’m amazed that this is a free resource!). While browsing, I noticed that the asset packs contained a surprising number of bedroom-related assets, and figured: what better scene to recreate in UE5 than a painting literally called “Bedroom”?
Bedroom in Arles, Vincent van Gogh, 1888
And with that, I set off to recreate Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 painting Bedroom in Arles. As I continued going through the editor course, I’d watch a video and put what I learned into practice while building a rough reproduction of van Gogh’s painting.
While constructing the map, I picked up a few extra skills that weren’t included in the course:
PolyCut: I needed to use PolyCut to make a hole in a wall for a window, and learned how to cut holes in static meshes with this UE5 community post.
Version Control: On Friday, I opened my game file and the map I’d worked on for 3 days was gone. It looked like I had lost my full project, but I eventually found where my map was (unharmed) and was able to keep working. It scared me enough that I vowed to use version control for all future projects, and watched this quick YouTube video to learn how to do it.
Changing Asset Colors: After setting up the scene using free assets, it looked more drab than I wanted, even for an educational exercise. I wanted to change all of the colors in the scene, so I learned how to apply colors to materials and drag-and-drop them onto the static meshes around my scene using this video.
Packaging a Game: By the end of the week, I was pleasantly surprised that I wasn’t as harshly overcritical of what I’d done as I usually am! I learned how to clean up unused assets from my project here, I ensured my map was the default level of the game using this documentation, and then I wrapped up by watching this video on setting project settings to ensure you properly package and export your game.
Shipping my first project
Moving around the scene I assembled using free assets
After reminding myself that perfect is the enemy of done, I was happy enough with how my level looked to export it, so I packaged my game and exported it for Mac using what I learned in this YouTube video.
I’ll aim to make everything I build as I learn free and public to get over my self-criticism and have a record of how far I’ve come when I look back at where I started someday in the future. I tried to upload the game file to itch.io (a game hosting platform that’s friendly to indie devs), but ran into a storage issue that I didn’t have time to resolve before getting this post up.
You can download a ZIP file containing the Mac version of this scene if you want to spend a few seconds bumping around in the scene, or you want to find the loophole in my scene to…
enter the void
enter the void
enter the void
enter the void
Final Thoughts
This week of learning was really fun! I’m still working out what gives me the most motivation when it comes to learning, and coming up with my own scene to work on alongside the Unreal introduction was an unexpected joy. Building like this was more engaging than tutorials usually are for me – I encountered issues along the way that I needed to find a solution to, and encountering a few initial stumbles tickled the same part of my brain that loves solving crosswords.
My goal of learning 2 hours a day, 5 days a week also worked out nicely. I appreciated the structure, and found myself looking forward to learning, even when I returned home from seeing The Lehman Trilogy at 11pm on a Friday and still needed to finish the remaining hour of my study.
Finally – while I don’t think this looks anything like van Gogh’s work, it is the first thing I’ve ever built and shipped in a game engine, so I’m proud of it!
Resources
I have quite a few resources to share this week from extra bits and bobs I picked up while crafting my first scene. Most are called out inline in the sections above, but I specifically wanted to highlight my favorite general resources from this past week.
Unreal Engine 5.3 Documentation: Official Unreal Engine 5 documentation from Epic Games (the company that makes UE5). I’ll start reading the “Understanding the Basics” section this week, and I’ll also read through sections relevant to programming and game design over the coming weeks.
Unreal Editor Fundamentals - Editor Introduction: This is also from Epic – if you learn best from visual lessons, I’d recommend this (it’s narrated by the man with the aforementioned pleasant voice!).
Wrap
If you want to be notified of the next post, sign up below! I’ll be back next week with my thoughts from the first week of the Udemy UE5 course.
Until then,
Vesha
