Of everyone I have worked with over the past few years, ranging from life-long professional programmers to "What is source code?" and having started on everything from Ruby to C++ to Construct and Unity, nearly every one of them who tried Unreal Engine stayed with it.

Simply put, it is as easy as Unity and at the same time, arguably the most powerful/capable engine there is.

You can create entire, working games without a single line of code, and transition to rewriting the engine itself in C++ .. and every degree in between, so there is no sacrifice of Power for Ease or vise versa.

I don't suggest you limit yourself to it, or any other one method or product, not by any means. But it is the ideal starting point IMO. You can focus on game logic and use standard assets, and gradually learn to replace everything with your own work until you are creating everything from scratch.

I agree with nearly everything you've said.

I'm a big fan of unreal, moving into it about two years ago from always writing everything from scratch (essentially, it's my first "commercial engine").

Whilst i agree that blueprints are incredibly user friendly, and encourage software development by non-technical people, there is still a lot of assumed knowledge. If you don't know 3D maths, and how the 3D coordinate space works, what a direction vector is, or linear algebra, you'll struggle.

Also, if you don't yet understand the basic engine concepts such as an asset pipeline, what an asset actually is, what models are, or how the build system "cooks" your project, you'll find it much harder to get into than if you research and understand these concepts before you try to make anything big.

Also, the whole lighting facilities of unreal are extremely complex and pretty advanced, and even coming to UE4 after many years of game development i still struggled to grasp some concepts and had to refresh my knowledge before some of it made sense.

There really isn't anything you can't do with blueprint that you can do in C++, however the performance of blueprint is pretty poor for a few things, namely loops with lots of iterations, casting and runtime checking types of classes.

By all means, use UE4 as a first engine to learn concepts (you'll do much less "classical" coding than in Unity) but make sure you don't neglect the basics. If you're new, learn linear algebra, 3D coordinates space etc and how they relate, vectors.

When you start programming in a 3D engine make sure you can answer the following and you'll find things easier. (Note these questions are pretty UE4 centric)

• What is an FVector?
• How do FVector2D and FVector differ?
• What is an FRotator? How does it differ from FVector and how is it similar?
• Which of the three X, Y, Z coordinates represents "Up" in unreal?
• How might the representation of "Up" cause issues with models you create and import?

Just some stuff to get you started.

Note, if you avoid 3D entirely for the time being, you can avoid a lot of these problems until you are good and ready.

Good luck!

Well, you should learn how to code first. Have a lot of coding tutorials out there for beginners. You need to choose the most relevant programming language that most related to the game development. Try this http://thekoalition.com/2014/top-best-indie-game-development-programs-beginners and http://kotaku.com/5979539/a-beginners-guide-to-making-your-first-video-game