So, you want to program your own games using Unreal Engine 4 (UE4). You have a great number of reasons to do so:
- UE4 is powerful: UE4 provides some of the most state-of-the-art, beautiful, realistic lighting and physics effects, of the kind used by AAA Studios.
- UE4 is device-agnostic: Code written for UE4 will work on Windows desktop machines, Mac desktop machines, Android devices, and iOS devices (at the time of writing this book—even more devices may be supported in the future).
So, you can use UE4 to write the main parts of your game once, and after that, deploy to iOS and Android Marketplaces without a hitch. (Of course, there will be a few hitches: iOS and Android in app purchases will have to be programmed separately.)
A game engine is analogous to a car engine: the game engine is what drives the game. You will tell the engine what you want, and (using C++ code and the UE4 editor) the engine will be responsible for actually making that happen.
You will build your game around the UE4 game engine, similar to how the body and wheels are built around an actual car engine. When you ship a game with UE4, you are basically customizing the UE4 engine and retrofitting it with your own game's graphics, sounds, and code.