Don't miss out on Epic Games' Free Unreal Engine 5 course

Unreal Engine has become hugely popular for game development as well as for digital art and 3D visualisation. Getting started in Epic Games' engine can be daunting, however. So anyone looking to start out or progress may want to grab free access to the Unreal Fellowship, which offers expert guidance.

For a limited time, Epic is offering open access to a course normally reserved for industry professionals by invite only. The course is known for providing intensive, bootcamp-style training in using UE5 to develop games(you might also want the best laptop for game development).

Epic Games' free Unreal Fellowship: Games course is now open to both beginner and experienced developers. The course starts with the basics then goes on to explore advanced features of Unreal Engine specifically for game production covering the entirel Unreal Engine art pipeline.

The course takes the form of webinar-style recordings, with 15 classes and multiple guest speakers. Topics include programming using the Blueprint visual scripting system and integration mechanisms, creating custom shaders that react to gameplay, developing a distinctive art style, producing advanced Niagara visual effects that interact dynamically with gameplay, efficiently filling environments using procedural content generation (PCG) tools, using lighting techniques to achieve specific atmospheric conditions and optimizing and packaging games for final production.

Arcade games have been chosen as the theme for the course to allow experimentation with diverse styles and innovative gameplay. Epic's instructors will run two-hour Q&A sessions in each session.

Free access is being offered for a limited time via the Epic Developer Community from 3 December to 15 January 2025

See prices below if you need a new laptop for game development. To learn more about Unreal Engine, see our roundup of Unreal Engine 5.5 features and an artist's personal project to develop a system for real-time weather visualisation in Unreal Engine.