Engine

Unreal Engine 4

Project Type

Tutorial

Number of times run

Once

Approximate Audience

30 people

Overview

While I normally run my Intro to Unreal Engine tutorial in the weeks leading up to our termly (every 4 months) game jam, we decided it would be valuable to run both a Unity and Unreal Engine tutorial at the start of Global Game Jam (at the uWaterloo site). In general, we get a not of novice game developers from the university out to our jams (read: mainly programmers who have never made a game) so spending the first evening of a jam running tutorials is pretty popular. However, that meant I only had 1 hour to introduce people who had never used a game engine (other than the 1 hour Unity tutorial right before) to Unreal Engine.

As with my other tutorial, I had a pretty similar set of goals:

• The tutorial had to be less than 1 hour long
• The tutorial should minimize the amount of programming knowledge needed to appeal to a broad audience
• The tutorial should touch as many parts of UE4 as possible so people know that they exist
• Ideally, people should walk away with something playable
• Ideally, people should be able to follow along
• Ideally, the tutorial should only use built-in assets

As such, I elected not to start from scratch, but rather use one of the built-in templates. As such we started with the first-person shooter template with the end goal of making a game where you can shoot enemies and have them lose health until they die.

You can see the end result of the tutorial above. We covered the following areas:

• Basic editor usage
• Level prototyping using BSPs
• Blueprint basics
• Construction scripts
• Damage

Overall, I was pleased with what was covered in just an hour!