My first completed class

My first step on improving my future career outlook was to take an Unreal Engine course on Udemy.com. It is a 10-hour course that teaches how to create a basic game involving fire damage, platforming, collecting some orbs and opening an end door.

If you are unfamiliar with Udemy you should check it out. They have classes on just about everything. Some of them seem a little overpriced or outdated but they have sales fairly often and I like that you can go at your own pace jumping back and forth as needed. The learning is better structured and the instructors seem to be more knowledgeable and the classes more organized than many YouTube videos I have tried.

I’ll start by saying that this 10 hour course actually took me closer to 30 hours. I needed to slow things down to see what the instructor was doing and go back and re-watch several portions. There were also fairly large gaps of time between some of the lectures due to my schedule and I needed to go back and refresh my mind when restarting.

One of the issues I ran into occurred when creating the timing for the moving platforms and other animations. We used a timeline node and created a cycle with keys where we input the x and y values given by the instructor. For some reason whenever I compiled and saved the timelines and went the play the game, the animations did not work. When I went back in and re-entered the keys a second time and compiled it suddenly worked. This happened every time I did a timeline, I would have to go in and redo the coordinates for it to work. I still haven’t figured out why.

The other issue is somewhat embarrassing but apparently something similar happened to a friend of mine. There is a door at the end of the level that I thought was supposed to open when I approached the collision barrier around it. Needless to say, it did not work and I spent an uncomfortable amount of time trying to figure out why. Well it turns out it had about 2 weeks of time between when I created the door and when I finally tried to use it in game. It turns out that the door was set to open when the ‘F’ key was pressed on the keyboard and I had totally forgotten until I went back through the lesson. So I am making an effort to go through classes more consistently with less of a gap between lessons. 

This class was relatively easy to follow with a good walk through of basic level editing functions and a tutorial on actors in the beginning. I feel like it improved my confidence with the software somewhat and I learned a lot of the terminology involved with Unreal Engine and basic blueprint programming.