We've seen how Unreal Engine games dominated the trailers at the Game Awards 2024. That should be enough to tempt anyone new to the engine to sign up for the next Unreal Fellowship, Epic Games' annual bootcamp.
Epic Games has announced that the Unreal Fellowship: Games 2025 programme will run from 24 March to 11 April for North American time zones and from 6 May 6 to 23 May for UK and European time zones. The deadline to apply in both cases is 21 January.
The theme for this edition of the course is arcade games, encouraging participants to experiment with a range of visual styles and gameplay. you can learn more and see how to apply at the Unreal Engine blog.
Enrollment is only open to people who have a minimum of three years’s experience in creating games and who have worked on at least one published game. Applicants will need to provide a portfolio of work.
But remember that right now anyone can access a free Unreal Engine 5 course, which contains much of the content from the Unreal Fellowship. Open access is available until 15 January.
What is the Unreal Fellowship?
Epic Games' Unreal Fellowship is a bootcamp-style virtual training programme intended for people who work in the games industry but are new to Unreal Engine. That includes game designers and art directors, lead programmers, technical artists and gameplay developers. environment artists and level designers, character artists, texture artists, animators, modelers and UI designers.
Mentors guide participants through the process of producing a functioning game with Unreal Engine, from concept art through final delivery. Guest speakers also provide insights into how Unreal Engine is being used in AAA game development.
Topics include programming using the Blueprint visual scripting system and its integration mechanisms, creating custom shaders that react to gameplay, developing a distinctive art style that unifies the project’s visual aspects and producing advanced Niagara visual effects that interact dynamically with gameplay. The course also covers filling environments using procedural content generation (PCG) tools, using lighting techniques to achieve specific atmospheric conditions and optimizing and packaging games for final production.
Participants need to be able to make a full-time commitment for the first three weeks of the course, which last four weeks in total. Applicants receive funding to help finance their study.
Unreal Engine is dominating game design at the moment, but competition may be on the way. Gaijin Entertainment thinks its open-source Dagor Engine may beat Unreal Engine for realism and PlayerUnknown Productions has released Preface: Undiscovered World, a free tech demo of its Melba engine for creating new worlds.
