Epic Game Coursera Program

I started this course in order to complete what was an official certificate course declared by Epic Games. The program was called "Epic Games Game Design Professional Certificate"

This was meant to cover many of the import of the engine including but not limited to Fundamentals, Level Development, Blueprinting, Animation, Audio, UI, Gray boxing, and Prototyping.

Course 1

For the following courses I was covering what it meant to be a Game Designer vs a Level Designer. It covered many parts of the role such as the Game Design Document which I was informed to try making my first one in the end. My Final is attached below this.

GDD for Dungeon Mimic.docx

Download DOCX • 58KB

Course 2

The second Course was titled, "Fundamentals of Unreal Engine". This covered a large range of subjects such as landscape tools, shortcuts, importing assets. It was mainly to give a overview of what I will be learning in future courses of this program. At the end I had to create a level using what I learned throughout the course and submit walkthroughs and pictures of the level. Some of these I have attached below this including the walkthrough along with a few added photos. While the importing and basics were pretty easy to understand, I found that some of the material creation was difficult to understand completely.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/d7cd1d_0342b2720bc24ed8a61398063f239215/720p/mp4/file.mp4

Fundamentals of Unreal Engine Final Project

Course 3

This course was on the Fundamentals of Level Design. It went into physically planning out levels on paper, Level Maps, Pathing Diagrams, the importance of a Level Design Document. Some of the big lessons were about your audience vs demographic, the importance of playtesting, puzzle implementation and much more. While I feel that this is one of the areas I specialize in, the gray boxing course was one of the easiest to understand. I believe that the more I get into this program it will get much more detailed into the level design process and encounter hurdles in the process.

Divinity Level Design Document.docx

Download DOCX • 143KB

Playtest Implemented Changes.docx

Download DOCX • 15KB

Playtest_Respawnses.csv

Download CSV • 1KB

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/d7cd1d_248e04204e504df5861aec3ae97d903b/720p/mp4/file.mp4

Level Design Final: Grayboxed Prototype

Course 4

This course dives further into the function and basics of blueprinting in Unreal Engine. This Course mainly covered the Button and a Door project in which you learn about using blueprints to create a door and a button that activates it. The greater lesson behind the lesson is understanding different ways in which you can communicate between blueprints including but not limited to using interfaces, creating key items that activate other blueprints, and casting between blueprints.

Information on Courses 5-6

The next courses are many different courses that all connect into a larger project. I learning a large amount from these courses, while it was a hard grind and took up a large amount of time, I found it was well worth it in the end.

Course 5

This course covered basic parts of effects in unreal engine including how to adding animations, using the Niagara system, and 3D modeling into the game. Out these courses, I found it to be the worst due to previous courses having covered many of the fields mentioned in this one. I felt like this one was meant to be a refresher in a sense but I just found it wasting a good amount of time in my opinion.

Course 6

User Interface (UI) was what the main point of this course covered. We started by understanding the Theory and examples what different types of UI may look like such as minimalistic UI. After gaining an understanding of what a UI would look like, the course goes through how to create the different elements within a UI such as buttons, Player stats (Health, Mana, Stamina), Moveable Windows, etc. The most interesting UI element to me was creating the movable window because I found moveable windows to be very interesting that is not seen often in many games. The game I can most recently recall having moveable windows would be the MMO Final Fantasy. Lastly, it helped give an understanding of an alternate way to create widget which is creating main hub with each UI placed on it. You would then have it appear and reappear based on interfaces and interacting in game.

Course 7

Most of course 7 was not taking place in Unreal Engine but covered aspects of the design process that you need to consider outside engine. This includes user experience, player disability, and the types of goals to consider (Second, minute, 15 minute, hour, and Long). It was short but had great advice and tips.

Course 8

This was the most difficult course of the eight as it covered the most material and took the most amount of time to complete. This was due to it covering how to make 6 types of games and how to find, design, and implement all the important mechanics needed for the games to work at a beta level. It covered Platformer, Action Combat, Crafting, Stealth, Story, and Capture the Flag. While it was difficult work, I learned so much and this course was what helped me solidify my understanding of many aspects of Unreal Engine 5 and programming in engine. Using what I know now, I'm excited to apply it to my future projects that I will create.