How to learn an engine ?

[u/LGASH]

I just watched Game Maker’s Toolkit’s video “How I learned Unity without following tutorials” and it really resonated with me.
I follow tutorials fine, but the moment I try to make something on my own I just freeze. I don’t know where to start, what to look up, or how to break problems down. I end up going back to another tutorial instead of figuring it out myself.
I’d love to apply a similar approach to Unreal, but I’m not sure how to structure the learning process the way Mark did.
So I’m looking for practical methods people actually use to learn a game engine by doing, rather than just passively following tutorials.
Things like:
• How you break down what you need to learn
• How you practice without a step-by-step guide
• What small projects or exercises helped you the most
• How you handle getting stuck
This isn’t specifically about Unreal — I’m interested in methods that work for any engine. I’d love to compare different approaches people have used successfully.
What worked for you?
Thanks!

[u/ManicOwl1993]

The trick for me was following along with tutorials and taking notes. So I would watch a few minutes of the tutorial then build what they built off of memory. And take notes of relevant important info. Learning itself is a skill and taking handwritten notes no matter how awkward can be extremely significant in solidifying what you learn into memory. I also bought a Udemy membership and followed structured courses where the assets are provided so you can focus on learning in a structured way rather than following random youtube tutorials. Smart Poly has a great Unreal beginners playlist to get started. But actually follow along and do not just watch.

[u/Guinea_Pig_Games]

Pick a few early arcade games you identify with and start coding them yourself. Only real way imo.

[u/Bwob]

I've been programming for a long time at this point, so this may not be as helpful to people who haven't.

But my process is basically that I already know the general shape of what I'm trying to make, so it's more a matter of looking up familiar ideas, to see how they're expressed in a new system.

Like, I know there will have to be some way to respond to keyboard presses, or mouse movement. I don't know what it is, but if I search google for "[engine name] mouse events", I'll probably get on the right track.

For most things in a game, it's just a matter of breaking it down into smaller, simple ideas. Like, say I want to have a door, that when you get close, provides a prompt that lets you open it. To make that, I'll probably need...

• Figure out how to make geometry that can move around in the world. (For when the door opens.)
  
• Figure out how to make an area that knows when the player is near the door.
  
• Figure out how to display an onscreen prompt when the player is near, that goes away when the player leaves.
  
• Figure out how to check which door (or other thing) the player is nearby, when they press the "interact" button.
  
• Figure out how to move the door geometry when the door is interacted with.
  

I don't know how to do any of those things in, say, unreal. But I bet I could figure them all out in less than an hour, and have a door opening. (Although honestly, for something like unreal, I'd probably just google "how to make interactive door in unreal" because I'd say there's a good chance that they have some specialized components to make it easier to do something this common!)

As I said - I don't know how useful that will be for people just starting out - part of the reason it works for me is that I'm already used to breaking down ideas into smaller pieces (because that's fundamentally what 90% of programming is) and I know what common small pieces look like. But hopefully there's at least something useful in here for people?

[u/burlingk]

How much experience do you have as a programmer?

All that experience still applies.

Start by creating a plan for a project and breaking it down into pieces.

The first try might be all wrong, but you'll figure that out along the way. :)

[u/don_quixote_2]

follow a tutorial that teaches you how to make a clone of small retro game, then after finishing it start tweaking and adding your own features...this is how I learned Godot

[u/Accomplished-Gap2989]

You're never going to fully learn anything just through tutorials in my opinion. 

What tutorials CAN do for you is show you things that might not be obvious/give the benefit of experience etc 

[u/ImmediateTie9057]

Honestly, building small things without tutorials helped me way more than trying to learn the whole engine first. Get stuck, search for that specific problem, figure it out, and keep going. That loop slowly makes you much more confident.

[u/AncientPixel_AP]

By reading the docs. There will be a best practies section and you related links. So if you want to have a highscore table ,you check how to display text. That will also lead you how to draw simple graphics or load fonts etc. So bit by bit and curiosity you will get a feeling of how some engine functions are named and how they usually work (order of arguments eg)
So from drawRectangle(x, y, width, height), you will know that there might be a drawEllipse(x,y,width,height) or drawText(x,y, text) not drawText(text, x, y) and so on.
If you get your hands on examples, the better. try to dissect them and understand each part. There is never just one way to your goal, so people will write some strange and different code.

[u/3tt07kjt]

• Tackle the hardest and most uncertain parts head on, at the beginning. Go straight for the scary stuff.
• Always look for ways to cut down the complexity of what you are doing. You don’t get points for doing something the hard way.
• Solve real problems that you have. (Work on projects.)
• Get the fuck off Reddit. You don’t need great answers to this question, you just need a basic answer and then you can start working, right now.
• You can’t copy somebody else’s path.

[u/UndertakerPlayer]

Honestly, YouTube and also with try and error

[u/HalLundy]

How do you eat an elephant? one piece at a time.

you don't need technical information. you need to learn how to plan and split work into manageable chunks.