Page Text: Unreal Engine 4
Unreal Engine 4
This beast is not only an editor, it’s an entire engine, made by Epic Games and power multiple industry AAA-titles such as Unreal Tournament (never forget), Gears of War, PUBG, Dishonored, and Fortnite. Many games and companies make use of this engine and it’s great. It can be used as a base and then programmers with C++ competencies can go in and reshape the engine to their and their companies needs. The designers work in a visual language called Blueprints. The Blueprints are the networks or pages with nodes where all the scripts live. UE4 looks stunning and has support for all the modern ways of rendering. Materials and textures made with industry-standard tools such as Substance Designer or Substance Painter really shines here. Especially with the great lighting effects supplied by the engine
As a designers tool it gets the job done. It has support for BSP to block out levels but it is primarily an engine focused on static meshes. Almost everything, if not everything except terrain, in Unreal should be built with static meshes. Static meshes as in models. Even the ground the player will walk on are in several games exported bsp-brushes that are later polished up and rebuilt as static meshes. You can however, use the BSP system and it works without any problems, but it is slow and you don’t have the freedom or power that Source provides. Coming from Source to Unreal for the BSP feels like a major downgrade and this is a common opinion in the Unreal community from designers. There is no AI for singleplayer coming with UE4, however there are bots for your multiplayer maps that are sufficient. You can however create your own AI in blueprints.
UE4 has a massive community behind it and Epic Games and other companies or people give away tons of free content every now and then. You can build visually stunning levels in this editor without hassle and with free assets, both the assets that come with Unreal Tournament and the assets that are free or can be bought on the marketplace. Great engine if you want to design a team-deathmatch level or just show off some of your detail, art and lighting skills.
An important note on scripting. Scripting events and objects like doors, jump pads, game mechanics and so forth can show off a lot of skills in the industry. To show future employers that you can handle blueprints are a great thing! Be aware though, that some companies will look at your scripting and put you to be a game designer instead of a level designer so you have to be clear in your communications for what you seek as a designer. Some designers love to script everything and create mechanics and what not, those are probably more game designers. Others use scripting as a means to an end like spawning enemies, triggering events and such and this is more level design. You will have to decide for yourself where you want to put the bar.
Designer’s rating