Hey, what's up? It's me again, the toxic, negative game dev YouTuber here to tell you all about game dev and probably deter you from it.

Uh, no, I'm kidding. Anyways, in the last video, I somehow made people misconstrue the video as a way of saying don't use UE5, even though that's not exactly what the video was for.

A lot of people got misled, apparently, and a lot of people felt uninspired to continue with Unreal Engine, even though that wasn't the point of the video at all.

I'm not trying to stop people from learning Unreal Engine.

I've been using it for eight years, and I'm going to continue using it for the years ahead, however long I do game development for.

I love the engine; it's great. But here's the thing: a lot of people are just learning it incorrectly. You're just you're not learning it right.

I know that's a weird sentence to say, "You're not learning it correctly," isn't that weird? But it's a thing that can definitely happen, and I notice it a lot with people trying to create games and do these large-scale projects in Unreal Engine.

So, in this video, I'm going to tell you how to not learn it incorrectly.

Here's the first thing you don't want to do when you're doing a project—and I know this is going to be kind of counterproductive or counterintuitive—you don't want to go in and start a game.

I know that sounds weird, but you kind of just want to go in and take it one step at a time. If you go in trying to make a game and you're using every single feature possible—the animation system, widget blueprints, all these other things—it's like going to a classroom learning English, math, physics—which is a part of math, it's science—and like five million other things at the exact same time, and there's like seven teachers talking to you at the same time.

You don't want to do that; that's impossible. So here's what I hear, here's what I propose you do: everything one step at a time.

You tell yourself, "Hey, for the next two weeks, I'm gonna dabble with UI a little bit." And while dabbling with UI, maybe you do a bit of Blueprinting and stuff like that.

Obviously, that's going to be included with Widget Blueprints and working with UI.

Obviously, you've got to slap in some functionality and stuff in there. Basically, you want to treat it like a school curriculum.

Now, you could probably include that into a project and take everything in one step at a time, but you'll kind of have to, I guess, separate everything into their tasks, and you're going to notice that, hey, when you work on animations, it's not going to contribute towards gameplay fully, or it might not contribute towards your main menu or little things like that.

Obviously, right? You're kind of separating everything into their own section.

That way, you can focus on specific things and not get super overwhelmed. That's what I would recommend for learning Unreal Engine.

Don't learn it by switching from thing to thing because you're obviously going to be overwhelmed. And here's another little thing: you don't need to use every feature.

You don't. In fact, in my eight years of using UE4, I think there's like 80% of the features I haven't even touched.

There's so many other features that you're probably not going to touch as a game developer either. There's so many little things that contribute towards film and you know product design and stuff like that that you're never going to use, so honestly it's kind of like a process of you just ignoring things.

You kind of just have to look at what you're working on and what you're doing and you'll ignore the other things.

Unfortunately, that's kind of one of the flaws of Unreal Engine is that they just kind of throw a bunch of stuff at you even though you're not using it.

Like back in the UE4 days, you would boot it up, start up a new project—you're making a desktop project, but for some reason, the VR plugins are enabled by default.

So by the time you package the game, all of your players are going to have their Steam VR systems open up, and they're like, 'What the hell?

I'm not playing VR.' I would say you know, disable a lot of the plugins you don't need.

Anything that's mobile-related or VR-related, and if you're not working on VR or mobile, disable that stuff.

Get it out of there. You don't need it. That also increases your package development sizes and all this mumbo jumbo that you don't really need.

But unfortunately, that's one of the flaws of Unreal Engine; they kind of just throw a bunch of stuff at you even though you don't really need it.

So that's what I would say. Short, little, sweet video.

Hopefully, this is kind of just a little bit of, I guess, the second episode to the 'Why is UE5 so complicated' video that everybody misconstrued as me saying, 'Hey, this engine [is bad],' but in reality, that's not the point of the video at all.

I think if anything, the engine can you know, size down.

We can definitely have togglable things where you don't need to expose certain features of the engine until you need it, or unless you need it for your project or the specific needs of your project.

That's what I would tell you, though: if you're learning Unreal Engine, it's okay to be overwhelmed by it.

Just, you know, take it one step at a time. Focus on things almost as if it's a school curriculum.

Anyways, thanks for watching. Hope this maybe helped you. I don't know. I'll see you in the next video. Have a fantastic weekend, and uh, yeah, yeah, subscribe and like the video.

YOU'RE LEARNING UNREAL ENGINE 5 WRONG

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