as i've looked through job postings for programmers in the games industry, i'm noticing a lot of unreal engine, especially pertaining to graphics... i already have experience working with bespoke game engines, as wel as their own rendering and shader systems (source code listing of part of a renderer implementation i made for a game engine source port as proof), and i'm happy with what i've learned. but is it worth learning unreal only if it means my skills would look more desirable? i like to imagine that maybe there's something in unreal i'm missing out on that would pique my interest, but as it stands i haven't had too much interest in touching the "big two" engines merely because it feels like their sheer scale allows for "too many" tooling approaches to a particular problem...
- she/her
- foreverwip.github.io/
far like the future, bright like the soul
trans programmer & gamedev, occasional multimedia creator, amy rose kinnie
nd/adhd/(possibly) autism
in reply to @amy's post:
in my year or so of (admittedly amateur) experience with UE, i have found it to be a very difficult system to learn. it's super super powerful, but it hides things from you, has lots of counterintuitive behavior, and has terrible documentation. if you want to apply for UE jobs specifically, i would definitely at least poke around with it and try to see how your existing skills map onto it, to avoid footguns preemptively if nothing else. if you are just curious about it as an engine, i'd say it's got some neat tricks but nothing super special, it's just what you'd expect a mature engine made by a big company to look like. (there may be really cool stuff inside of specific subsystems, but i have only really engaged with it as a client so far, so i can't really comment on that)
good luck on jobhunt!
From an acquaintance without co-host: `I've seen this sentiment come up before... I don't think Unreal is going to become the sole big engine everyone uses, because it's a little bit more focussed on AAA Realism Games so isn't suitable for everything, but at least my and others I know who use unreal's experience is that we can't get enough programmers, so there's deffo roles going for it.
learning c++ for job security is a pretty big learn. unreal also has its visual scripting, and the new "simpler" scripting language they are working on/releasing, so there's a bunch of different approaches a programmer could learn if wanting "job security via knowing unreal engine"`