There are a few striking differences between Enterprise Software Development and Game Development. I am talking about differences here because at first sight these two things are similar. Both include coding on the same set of languages (C#, C++), both produce software. But this is where the similarities end.
I got used to a methodological approach in developing a software for business. There are a lot of academic researches which goal is just to improve a development process itself. This is where Agile and Scrum came from. This lead to things like CI and CD and Docker, Kubernetes, etc. And this is what Game Development industry has a lack of. For instance, you need a good reasoning for choosing a mono-repository systems to store your source code. But for gamedev industry Perforce is a default tool.
Another thing caused by an academic approach in Entgerprise Software Development is a huge amount of really good books and courses out there. Search for “Java”, “Patterns”, “Databases” on Amazon and you will get a list of excellent books. And you will never ever able to read them all.
Game Development on the other side is really poor in terms of study materials. A few years ago, you had almost nothing to read or watch about Unreal Engine 4. There were just a few notable exceptions. One of them is a course by Ben Tristem on Udemy. He and his team produced a few really good courses: on Unity, on Blender and recently they added another one: Unreal Engine C++ Developer: Learn C++ and Make Video Games. It is especially important for people planning to spend most of their time in C++ rather than in Blueprints (btw, Ben recently announced that they are working on an Unreal Engine Blueprint course).
I wish I watched it before starting to work on Kosmofront (my first game project). How much time I would have saved if I watched the “Battle tank” section of the course first. Spring physics, AI implementation, etc. – learning all of these on my own took literally months of my precious free time. If I had watched the course first, then who knows, maybe Kosmofront would be more successful.
But now, I decided to finish the course and its last section “Testing Ground FPS” before fully merge into my new project “Saturday Morning Frag” TPS shooter.
Anyway, as a summary – for all Unreal Engine 4 beginners, I cannot recommend this course enough – go buy it. It costs about twenty bucks.
