Bye Unreal!

Atleast for now...

With making this site and a month of development into my Unreal project, I've decided to take a step back and reevaluate my approach. I originally picked up Unreal becuase I wanted to get some experience with it. I had messed around with GameMaker Studio a bit and had previously worked with Unity, but had been a bit intimidated by Unreal. With a boost of confidence from the game jam in January I decided to try and send it on the big Unreal project I was too afraid to start working on.

I started by picking up some Udemy courses on Unreal and they were an amazing jump start. Learning vital elements of the development process and workflow, to keyboard shortcuts, I really recommend everyone to take a look if there is something youve been struggling to learn. I jumped right into the class projects and it is a ton of fun to use. There are so many tools to get you going and I had a basic 3d platformer after a few hours of work. I continued with another lesson and eventually started working on a 2d/3d action game based on the mega man battle network games.

After spending a bit of time on my own project I began to realize that while Unreal was fun, it was a bit overkill for what I wanted to do. Everything in the engine feels like it is built with large AAA games in mind. When I have a simple 2d grid based movement i ended up having to do a bunch of extra work just to get stuff to behave properly in 3d space. As frustrating as that was, there was another reason I am moving on from unreal for now...

Blueprints

When i first started, I lvoed the blueprint. It was sos simple to follow along with the classes and the code was pretty intuative to understand as I did it. When I started on my own project I was having a bit of trouble understanding what I had done before. Rewatching portions of the class helped but the more code I hade the more this became a problem.

I don't know if I'm just terrible at mamangeing the connections but every thing eventually looks like a big bowl of spaghetti with criss crossing lines. Even when its not a mess, you need to swap from reading left to right and right to left as you go. While I appreciate their help in the learning process I would really prefer to write actual code.

Why not just learn c++

You can't make me

But to be honest, I have a havit of putting myself in tutorial hell. I make a basic project in a new framework and feel accomplished. Then rather than getting better and making more advanced projects I run along to the next tool. So, rather than learning another languages and engine,, I'm just going back to Unity for now. It's a good balance between GMS and Unreal. Lets see how it goes!