It's hard learning new things and if you're here I assume you've already taken the first steps. While those may have been the easiest steps in the journey ahead, the good news is the world is full of Unreal Engine resources and wonderful Unreal Engine experts happy to help you along the way. Welcome! I can't wait to see what you make!
In this article I'll be going into great detail about things I wish I did or knew about as a beginner almost a decade ago. I'll be keeping this specialty-agnostic and I think most of this advice applies even outside of Unreal Engine. It's a long one so I hope you find it useful!
The first and most important piece of advice I can give you is to avoid trying to stick it out alone. You are much more likely to succeed and have a good time along the way if you find a community and have places to ask for help when you get stuck. Networking shouldn't be an afterthought neglected until you think you are skilled enough to find a job. It's not how it works anyway. I prefer to call it making friends with folks who also do cool things. It's a way to get inspired and motivated, a way to magically absorb knowledge you otherwise would have never thought to learn, and then, and only then, if you get very lucky, it might lead to a job.
Making friends who also use UE should be as high on the priority list as learning technical skills of using UE. I don't want to hear you saying you're not good at it. It's a skill like any other, you have to be bad at it before you can be good at it. It's wild how far simply showing up and being nice can take you. Start there!
Assuming nobody printed this page out and handed it to you, you're reading this article on the internet. So you don't really have an excuse not to join any online communities. Though keep in mind that lurking, while perfectly valid, will never be as beneficial as actually participating. Find the spaces you feel most comfortable in and do your best.
There are too many communities out there to make a comprehensive list, so here's a few to get you started:
If meeting people in person is at all an option for you, you should at least try. Online communities are great but friendships form so much faster and stronger in person.
For UE specific local communities, start by checking official Unreal Engine communities for a chapter near you. If they don't have one yet, consider starting one! They're all volunteer-led.
For other related local communities, for example, gamedev, indie dev, virtual production, etc., check and/or ask on community newsletters, notice boards, your location's reddit thread, or Meetup.
There are many reasons to consider joining game jams. From learning new things to building a portfolio piece quickly, they can be a great experience. They're also a fantastic way to find friends and communities to join. If you don't know of any in-person jams in your area, check out Itch's game jam mega calendar. Just pick something that looks interesting and works with your schedule and join! Most are hosted by various communities and there are always folks looking for new team members to help them with their jam project.
In-person events can be expensive, especially if you need to travel for them. However, keep an eye on any events you hear about even if you can't attend: nowadays many of them have livestreams and/or post talks on YouTube afterwards. Check out the communities hosting them, see if you can join them. For Unreal Engine specifically, the biggest events are Unreal Fests happening around the world a few times a year. All talks get posted on their official YouTube channel (though usually with a big delay).
Some communities offer mentorship programs. Even if yours doesn't, there are many experts out there who would be willing to mentor you in some form or another. Keep an eye out for linkedin posts and profiles. Follow folks whose work you admire and don't be afraid to (politely!) reach out. Though don't take it personally if you don't get a response - people are busy, please respect their time. But if you don't ask, that's an automatic no, so as far as I'm concerned it's always worth it to try.
In this section I will not argue my personal opinions on efficient learning techniques as I find them to be fairly unique to each individual. Instead, I will discuss tools and habits you should focus on early to maximize your potential as a professional in your UE career.
First of all, keep detailed notes of everything you do and learn. About half of my daily job consists of things I've seen or done a year or a few ago. There is nothing more frustrating than remembering you've seen this issue before and it took you a week to find an answer in some obscure blog or forum but not being able to find it again. Same goes for workflows and setups: if life happens and a project gets neglected for a long time it can be annoying painstakingly figuring out the pieces and software you need to continue working on it.
In a perfect world your notes would be organized and easily searchable. However, don't go down the rabbit hole trying to figure out the absolute perfect piece of software and building the world's fanciest most perfect setup. Just start with whatever you have and migrate and/or build it up as you go and needs arise. If you want my advice, I'm a huge fan of Obsidian.
Use version control. From day 1. Even if you're not a programmer. I'm not joking. In addition to making you immediately much more hireable it will also keep your sanity. If you mess up catastrophically, you can just revert your changes and boom, you lost maybe an hour or two of work instead of months or more. Version control can be confusing (especially in UE context), but do your best! I believe in you!
That said, I can't tell you what version control to use. Perforce is often considered industry standard, but I don't find it particularly beginner friendly, especially when it comes to the setup (though it is free to use in certain circumstances, at least at the time of writing). Git is another popular one, though you'll have to figure out how you want to set it up and use it. I find it can work okay for UE projects if you're solo but anything past that can get very tricky very fast. If you want it hosted, consider Azure. As is common for Microsoft products it's a trip to figure out but once you do it's great, and, at least at the time of writing, actually free! The limits the free version imposes on you are very generous too.
There are many other options out there and some may be much less intimidating to set up and use. Maybe some day I'll do a deep dive and write up what I find, but today is not that day. I know I'm not making this sound any less intimidating. I'm sorry. Ask around for help and advice; find something that looks the least scary to you and just use it. Don't worry too much about what is standard in the career you're pursuing—it can vary a lot, and most of the time what they use is set up and managed by professionals so your experience trying to tough it out on your own may be far from what it should be.
Repeat after me: version control is not a backup! Keep regular backups of all your work. Yes, all of it if you can. It will be very fun looking back seeing how far you've come, but it's also going to become a repository of things you've made that you can draw from when you make new things. If I had a nickel every time I wished I still had that funky material I hacked together years ago at 4am for absolutely no reason whatsoever, I'd have a good handful.
Don't worry about your backups being the most secure and most perfect ever. Sure, ideally you would have multiple copies off-site, and would even have your version control itself backed up (yes, that is real!). But if that's too much or you don't want to worry about it, start simple. Just copy your projects onto a separate drive you keep in another room or something. It's a start.
A portfolio is incredibly powerful, especially if you're looking for your first job in the industry. The good news is that almost anything you do can be turned into a portfolio piece fairly easily. Keep the project, some screenshots, and ideally some gifs around for each class you take or any other project you partake in. Even small prototypes can often be dressed up enough to appear to be worth something. Keep everything as organized as you can with any data you can think of: when you did these things, why, and how. This way whenever you need to prove that you're good at what you do you'll have it all at your fingertips.
While it may seem annoying and kind of facetiously bureaucratic at first, I highly recommend familiarizing yourself with any relevant standards and guidelines. One unwritten industry standard that will pertain to nearly anyone is the Allar's Style Guide. It may seem old but everyone still uses it and trust me, everyone loves a colleague who can keep things tidy and organized in a way that makes things easy to understand and find. Depending on what you do, there may be even more commonly accepted standards you may be expected to follow, e.g. coding standards for programmers, so keep an eye out.
Obviously these aren't sacred laws (unless you work in a place where they are) and sometimes one can choose not to follow them. However, I still recommend at least using them as a starting point so you have a common ground with others as well as having your work look much more professional with fairly little effort.
You probably noticed me talking about not looking for the perfect tools nor trying to build the perfect workflows and setups from the get go. It's easy to look at someone who has been doing something for 50 years and think you must immediately do things the way they do it or you're a failure. The truth of the matter is that you won't know what you need until you use it, so even if you had the time and knowledge to spend upfront you'd still just end up wasting your time. Just start with whatever you have on hand or can find cheaply and easily. Adjust from there. 50 years down the line you too will have entire systems if you keep at it (or not, some things are best kept simple). My Obsidian notes started as a random jumble of random scribbles, and in some ways they still are. But they're getting better at serving my needs all the time and I'm starting to wonder how I lived without what I have now.
While this advice may sound trivial at first glance, it goes much deeper. I often hear beginners fearing they'll learn bad practices from a bad teacher or because they're self taught. I call gatekeeping on that. Everything I've ever done in my life I've looked back and thought I could do better. Especially being a software engineer I can't help but cringe every time I see my past work. That's how learning works and you have to tame your ego fast if you don't want it getting in the way. Chasing perfection of any sort will just leave you spinning your wheels in place and you won't ever get anywhere. Trust me, I've spent days designing systems with all sorts of fancy pieces to account for all sorts of imaginary future requests just to see them either not work, or the requests change immediately, or something else entirely. Get it done, make it work, you can make it better later. Over time you'll figure out where you can or cannot cut corners, it takes experience.
I first considered creating a huge list of resources for various UE topics, but quickly realized that would be a monumental task and wouldn't be of that much use to most. So I decided to highlight some Unreal Engine ecosystem specific resources that you may not know about.
Fab is a digital content marketplace run by Epic. You can find everything from 3D assets to code plugins there, including many of them completely free. In addition to the always free library, they select a few high-quality products every 2 weeks to give out for free (don't worry, the creators must sign up for it and they get compensated). I highly recommend checking back every time and grabbing your free licenses, even for things you don't intend to use. You never know what sort of project might come your way and what may come in handy for it.
Epic occasionally releases official sample projects meant to showcase engine capabilities or sometimes just to demonstrate how a small project could be made using UE. I highly recommend keeping tabs and studying any sample projects that seem interesting to you. In addition, you are allowed to use them as templates for a good starting point in your projects (even commercial ones) so don't be shy about it if it's gonna save you time. This Fab search should take you to most of them, though I don't promise it's the best way to find the exhaustive list (if one exists, please let me know).
Phew, that was a wall of text! And I still feel like I have so much more to say. Thank you for sticking with me!
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