Making Games with UE4

Faro on 05/06/2018 - 10:12

So I found out that Unreal Engine 4 is free to download and use and thought I'd give it a go and mess around with trying to make some 2d platformers.

I have no experience in coding, a little bit of basic computer operations knowledge and, other than that, just enthusiasm for learning and trying to make stuff.

The only experience I've had with game making prior to this is Mario Maker for Wii U, but I'm finding that's very limited for what I'm wanting to experiment with.

Does anyone have any advice or tips to help me with starting this new "experiment" of sorts? Or has anyone tried this for themselves? I'm doing this entirely for my own experience and fun more so than to make a career from it and I'm interested to hear from other people.

Gaming

Comments

  • Blitzfx on 05/06/2018 - 10:22

    Unity is far more portable and popular than UE4. Why do you want to stick with UE4?
    There's a lot more support material and there's official tutorials to get you started in Unity to learn how to make games.

    UE4 I heard is bit more powerful but I can't really say much more about it since I haven't used it.

    • Faro on 05/06/2018 - 10:30
      +1

      Basically googled free game development tools and saw that UE4 gives you everything from the start for free while Unity requires a subscription/fee to unlock all the content. As someone who has no idea about developing I thought the free option with all features would be best. I also just hear a lot about UE4 being "the best" whilst, being a Switch user, I mostly hear about porting issues from Unity.

      These are silly little issues, but I'm open to other engines if I can come to learn why one might be better for me than another

  • trustnoone on 05/06/2018 - 10:30

    Not really skilled in the area, but UE4 seems a bit overkill? And typically shines in 3d? Personally for 2D I'd go with either Unity or GameMaker if I didn't have programming experience, or I'd use libgdx if I had programming experience.

    Other then that, definitely try a few tutorials around, they usually have a good handle on how to make things and put things together. Once you become comfortable with the tutorials, you essentially "learn" from them to use into your own game, so using your own sprites etc and using similar code for your own purposes.

    Other then that, I reckon development is like 30 percent googling what the issue is, and copy pasting from stack overflow XD. Though I imagine if you wanted to get more into it, it would probably be a good idea to learn to program.

    • Faro on 05/06/2018 - 10:34

      Thanks for the response. I've been considering doing more courses on programming and stuff like that, but can't really justify it given my financial and employment situation (i.e. not much money to throw around).

      Are GameMaker or Unity free? As I said in the post I have zero experience so free would be preferable to learn on and I'm keen to look at a few different options

      • c0balt on 05/06/2018 - 10:54
        +1

        Unity is free for personal use:
        https://unity3d.com/get-unity/download

        FWIW I learned more from self learning through websites and video tutorials than I did from class.

        Then again, it was a very poor class I took where they catered for the lowest quality denominator, going at the speed of the slowest students rather than the students who were learning the material as they went.

        There's a lot of good online university type courses, some often get posted for free on this website.

        Here's a free Unity online course that you can start right now, and do on your own time (so no excuses):
        https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/322377

        • Faro on 05/06/2018 - 11:03
          +1

          Excellent!
          This is the sort of stuff I was looking for. Thanks heaps!

  • [Deactivated] on 05/06/2018 - 12:36

    Are you interested in SNES era sprite 2D or sidescrolling polygonal pseudo 2D?

    • Faro on 05/06/2018 - 13:13

      I was thinking more so SNES style to start with. Been playing Celeste recently which has inspired me

      • [Deactivated] on 05/06/2018 - 14:41

        Most of the sprite era games were programmed with the OS graphics SDK like Microsoft DirectDraw, but that has been deprecated.

        For learning programming, Java has enough support for sprite type drawing to have some fun. Maybe have a look at the latest Microsoft DirectX SDK for a sprite/parallax demo in C/C++.

Login or Join to leave a comment
Login Join