Epic Games may be the word on everyone’s lips as the company behind Fortnite Battle Royale, but its Unreal Engine kit has been helping professionals and novices make their own games for years. Now, they’re pushing that initiative further by introducing Unreal Engine Online Learning; a platform designed to get more people making games. And it’s free.
Budding game developers have been able to use the Unreal Engine software development kit for years now without paying a penny for the privilege, but learning how to use the powerful suite hasn’t always been simple. Those looking to make their own games would either learn through serious education courses or look up tutorials on places like YouTube. Epic Games is hoping to make things a little easier with the Unreal Engine Online Learning platform.
The site, which is already live, isn’t just for game developers, either. Unreal Engine is used in plenty of other industries, and there are free classes and full courses on things like architecture and industrial design. You’ll even find 108 minutes of video material showing you how to implement VR into your 3D scenes.
Courses and classes are split into the “tracks” like Game Development or Media and Entertainment, with fields like the aforementioned Architecture and Industrial Design tossed in, too. Tracks are then further split into roles like Programmer or Designer and then labeled by difficulty level to keep new and experienced users on the right path.
The platform houses plenty of material that’s been featured on the Unreal Engine website before, but the new push brings them all together alongside “dozens of new videos” with the promise of new content being added “regularly.”
This is the latest in a string of great news from the Unreal Engine platform. Just a few weeks ago, Epic Games seemingly funneled some of their vast Fortnite profits back into the game development scene, boosting royalty rates paid out to those selling self-made assets on the Unreal store and even back-paying the improved rates to past purchases and their owners.