Teaching myself how to use the Unreal Engine during this summer resit became the most intimidating step in this process and my biggest obstacle. Overall, I found the terminology confusing, the layout overwhelming, and any tutorials I attempted to follow were not meeting the needs of my work. There also seemed to be very limited tutorial videos on YouTube of making a 2D platformer in Unreal, a majority of them seemed to be using the Unity Engine and claiming it was better for 2D development.
At first, I did attempt to work with Unreal, following this tutorial:
Although the latest version of Unreal is version 5.0.3, any tutorials I could find were for Unreal 4.0 versions. So I downgraded to a previous version of Unreal, having no idea if they were much different.
I chose this tutorial since it seemed to be all-inclusive for the entire process of making a game, however, I quickly ran into a lot of problems. First of all, I found the instructions very difficult to follow because of all the terminology used and the assumption I knew what it all meant along with the location of settings and such needed that were mostly glossed over.
However, I did start following this tutorial briefly. I learnt how to manage files by having named folders ready for each part of the development process, and I also changed some settings that may benefit me later on and make the game look much nicer with its lighting and colours.
After this point, I skipped ahead slightly and just watched the tutorial to see if any of it would actually be useful to me, and it seemed not. All assets used were pre-made and animated, unlike myself where I made the entirety of my assets and game art. The game style in this video was created was also very rigid and basic, while my style was quite artistic. Meanwhile, any tutorials I could find on the Unity engine seemed far more up-to-date and fitting for my style. So I didn't go much further than basic file and setting management with Unreal and decided to give Unity a try instead.
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