Learning Unreal C++ Strategies

[Joe_H]

I just want to ask a question regarding how people are attempting to learn the Unreal C++ stuff. I’m no newbie to C++, but the unreal C++ specific stuff is all new. I’m taking the course, and watch roughly 5-6 videos a day, but I find that after a few days I’ve forgotten much of what I learned just a few days ago. I sometimes find the challenges too hard since I haven’t really used the specific code more than once in the course…which leads me to my question.

What are your strategies for remembering the things taught in the course?

Do you take notes? If so how do you keep it generic enough to remember the core concepts and not just the specific task begin done in the video? Do you take notes on everything? I find some stuff is easy enough to remember, but other stuff is very specific to the task at hand and wonder if writing it down is worthwhile when I can just refer to the Unreal documentation instead?
Do you review the videos more than once? Ie: day 2 re-watch videos 1-4 before continuing?

I know we can always try and use the code we’ve learned in the video for other projects, but unless you have another similar project ready to go to experiment with it’s not always really applicable.

What other ideas/strategies do you use to keep the stuff fresh in your minds?

[DanM]

Honestly the best way to learn is to just practice on much smaller projects.

For instance you mentioned core concepts. I don’t know how far into the course you are but off the top of my head I would suggest you write TripleX using the BullCowGame project then move onto a different game like Hangman.
Then if you want to ramp up the difficulty write a game manager so the user can select which game they would like to play.

If you’ve gotten to Building Escape then try a simple puzzle game like Portal but without the portals.

So in a nutshell take a concept from a section and turn it into it’s own smaller scale project.