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Unreal Engine 5: The Complete Beginner’s Course (Udemy.com)

Learn Video Game Development & How To Design a Game From Scratch Using UE5

Created by: David Nixon

Last updated July 2025

Our take

Based on the ratings of 13,556 students, a sample of their written reviews and the syllabus, as the course stood in July 2025. No course pays to be reviewed.

Think of this one as a guided tour of the Unreal Engine 5 editor rather than a build-a-game marathon. David Nixon walks through projects, actors, blueprints, input, collisions, user interfaces and audio across 81 lectures and about 10.6 hours, and each section ends with a set of tutorial videos that apply the ideas in a small working game. It is aimed at total beginners with no programming background, and gameplay logic is scripted in Blueprints, so no coding is required. Over 73,000 students have enrolled and it holds a 4.6 rating from more than 13,500 reviews.

Students praise the structure most. One reviewer says earlier attempts at learning the engine left the important details unexplained, and others like that Nixon explains why a system works the way it does instead of clicking through it. The Players & Input section gets singled out for its detail. The complaints are consistent too. Low-star reviews call the delivery dry, with long stretches of listening and no exercises until the tutorials at the end of each section. One two-star reviewer felt the tutorials turned into a step-by-step guide without much understanding, and the jokes did not land for everyone. There are no quizzes or assignments to break things up.

The course was last updated in July 2025, so it tracks a recent UE5 build, which matters for an editor that changes often. It sits alongside C++ Unreal courses in our listings, and it makes a sensible first step before those. If a solid mental model of the editor is the goal, this is a good pick. If the goal is a finished game by the weekend, a more project-driven Blueprint course will feel more satisfying.

Best forAbsolute beginners who want the Unreal editor explained piece by piece before they start a project.
Skip it ifYou learn by building and get restless during long stretches of lecture with no hands-on exercises.

Pros

  • Explains why editor systems work the way they do, not just which buttons to press
  • Each section ends with tutorial videos that build a small working game
  • Updated July 2025, so the UE5 version on screen is recent
  • No coding needed: gameplay logic is scripted with Blueprints

Cons

  • Long lecture-only stretches; low-star reviewers found the delivery dry
  • No quizzes, assignments, or exercises outside the end-of-section tutorials
  • Tutorials can feel like following steps rather than understanding them
Truly beginner friendly in structure and delivery which is exactly what I needed to continue past the roadblocks I had run into.
Sage Bowers, a student

Genuinely beginner level: no coding required, but a mid-range PC with 8 GB RAM and a DirectX 11 card is recommended.

Featured in our guide: The Best Game Development Courses on Udemy in 2026

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What you will learn

  • Learn game development using Unreal Engine 5
  • Build realistic looking environments for games to take place in
  • Define custom inputs and movements to control characters
  • Script logic to define gameplay without needing to know how to code

Course content

9 sections · 81 lectures · 11 hours of video 2 articles

  1. 1Getting Started 5 free previews5 lectures · 33 min
  2. 2The Level Editor13 lectures · 1.6 hours
  3. 3Actors11 lectures · 1.7 hours
  4. 4Blueprints11 lectures · 1.9 hours
  5. 5Players & Input8 lectures · 1.3 hours
  6. 6Collisions5 lectures · 56 min
  7. 7User Interfaces17 lectures · 1.8 hours
  8. 8Audio5 lectures · 28 min
  9. 9Additional Topics6 lectures · 24 min

Who it is for

The instructor says it suits

  • This video game development course is for absolute beginners who are interested in making games & learning how to design a game from scratch using UE5
  • Designed for those who want to become professionals using Unreal Engine 5
  • No programming experience required

What you need before you start

  • Recommended: Desktop PC with Windows 7 (or later) 64-bit or a Mac with Mac OS X 10.9.2 or later
  • Recommended: 8 GB RAM
  • Recommended: Quad-core Intel or AMD processor, 2.5 GHz or faster
  • Recommended: DirectX 11 compatible video card
  • Unreal Engine 5 will run on desktops and laptops with specifications under these, but performance may be affected

How it compares

Against the other 70 rated Udemy courses in Unreal Engine on CourseDuck:

  • Rating4.6 out of 5higher than 60% of them
  • Reviews13,556#1 of 71 by number of reviews
  • Length10.6 hourslonger than 54% of them
  • Last updatedJuly 2025more recently than 71% of them

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Quality Score

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Overall Score : 92 / 100

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Course Description

Learn game development with Unreal Engine 5. UE5 is the industry-leading 3D game design software that the professionals use to create today’s top games. Start your journey towards getting paid to make video games today!


Learn Video Game Development with this Unreal Engine 5 Course for Beginners

Begin your game development career with possibly the most up-to-date game dev course on the internet - Unreal Engine 5: The Complete Beginner’s Course. Unlike other courses, which remain static, this course is regularly updated so that it will always cover one of the most recent versions of Unreal Engine 5.

When I began trying to learn Unreal Engine, I found a lot of information, but it was unstructured and lacked detail. So I created this course to provide what others lacked - structure and detail. The course is laid out very carefully so that you can go into it knowing absolutely nothing, and then, little by little, each lecture builds upon the previous lectures, so that every time you learn something new, you already have all the knowledge you need to learn that new thing without any confusion.

Unlike other courses, it covers the fundamentals in detail, so by the end you should have a thorough understanding of all the basics of Unreal Engine and be fully prepared to move on to more intermediate topics. Depending on your goals, this might not be for you. This course was designed for those who want to learn as much about Unreal Engine 5 as possible. If you’re just looking to have a bit of fun and to tinker around a little bit, then this might not be the right course for you. But, if you’re interested in getting really good, possibly becoming an indie developer or even working for a major studio, then I strongly believe that this is the best course for you to start with. This course will teach you the knowledge that normally falls through the cracks.

At the end of each section, there are a series of tutorial videos that provide an opportunity to apply the concepts learned in that section. These tutorials will walk you through the process of making a working game, from start-to-finish, step-by-step.

This course covers the fundamentals that other courses skip, causing you to get confused as you try to learn more advanced topics. The course will cover the following topics in thorough detail:

  • Projects & Levels

  • Actor Types

  • Meshes & Brushes

  • Lighting

  • Materials

  • Characters & Input

  • Collisions

  • Blueprint Logic & Data

  • User Interfaces

  • Audio


Develop Games Using Cutting-Edge Game Design Software

The Unreal Engine has won the “Best Game Engine” award several times from various organizations, including the Develop Industry Excellence Awards and Game Developer Magazine. It is considered by many to be the most powerful real-time 3D creation tool.

The Unreal Engine has been used to develop many blockbuster games and game franchises including Fortnite, BioShock, Gears of Wars, Splinter Cell, Rainbow 6, Borderlands, Dishonored, Mass Effect, Batman: Arkham Asylum, and hundreds more.

For years, the Unreal Engine was only affordable for large companies, but now, Unreal Engine 5 is completely free to use, as long as you agree to pay Epic Games 5% of your game sales over $1 million.


Learn Unreal Engine 5 in this Video Game Design Course

In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of game development using the Unreal Engine 5 through a series of 62 lectures and 15 tutorials. By the end of the course, you will have built an entire demo game from scratch.

The course will start from scratch and programming knowledge is not required, so anyone with basic computer skills can jump in and begin their Unreal Engine 5 training! For those who learn better with closed captions, 100% of the captions are human transcribed, not auto-generated.

The first part of the course will help you get the Unreal Engine 5 up and running and will introduce you to the basic concepts of game development using the Engine. Next, you will learn all the skills you need to craft beautiful environments to stage your games in. Then, you will learn how to script logic for your games so you can define game rules and behaviors, keep track of data such as health and inventory, and create playable characters. You will learn about collisions and damage, key concepts for any action game. You will learn how to create user interfaces using the UMG Editor, so you can add things like menus, load screens, and HUDs to your game. And finally, you will learn how audio works within the Engine so you can add music, dialogue, and sound effects to your game.

Upon completion of the course, you will have the skills necessary to translate ideas for games into playable games that use environments you sculpt and logic that you define, and you will understand how to make a game in Unreal Engine 5.



Learn How to Make Video Games Using a State-of-the-Art 3D Game Engine

Unreal Engine is powerful software that can be used for film & tv, architecture, and product development, but this course is specifically designed for learning how to make video games with Unreal Engine. It can be used to make games for PC, mobile, and consoles, including PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo consoles. The engine continues to be updated with amazing new features, such as Lumen, Nanite, Virtual Shadow Maps, World Partition, and MegaLights. These features allow you to create games that can quickly render huge amounts of geometric detail inside giant, immersive worlds. Unreal Engine has everything you need to develop professional AAA games.

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Instructor Details

David Nixon

David Nixon is a professional software developer and amateur game developer who holds a degree in Computer Science from Florida Atlantic University. He started his career developing websites and providing SEO services for companies nationwide. He then dove into the world of mobile gaming, developing the game Puzzlers. Recently, he worked as a web developer for a major SaaS company.

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Reviews

4.6

13,556 ratings on Udemy

Select a bar to show only those reviews.Select the bar again to show every rating.

By JONATHAN CVACK on 7/6/2026

Wish there were more exercises through these opening sections rather than just passive listening

By Dariusz Pleśniak on 6/2/2026

Po pierwszych 2 lekcjach, trudno zawyrokować o kursie. Dlatego wystawiam ocenę neutralną. Za szybko pytacie o ocenę kursu, w chwili waszego pytania i prośby o ocenę, kurs obejmował dopiero informację o czym będzie i instalację docelowego programu.

By Sage Bowers on 2/4/2026

My other attempts at learning the subject matter had the same problems listed in the opening of this course. Too much important details were either not explained in detail or there was not as much of an effort to understand how certain things about unreal engine work. In this course, concepts are explained in more depth, given examples and reasons for why a system functions the way it does and its intended purpose in the editor. Truly beginner friendly in structure and delivery which is exactly what I needed to continue past the roadblocks I had run into.

By Jacob on 1/19/2026

Thank you for all the hard work you put into the class I have learned a lot and feel more confident in finding my way around unreal. this was the perfect class for me to start my game development path.

By Luiz Eduardo Giampaoli on 1/11/2026

Exactly what I was looking for. I am a developer with programming experience. I want to use Unreal for hobby and professional use cases (games and experiments). This course offer good foundational structured knowledge that empowers the student to be able to start using the engine kwowing what is being done and not only copying and pasting "tutorial steps".

By Roshan Saini on 11/28/2025

Great Course to Start Game Development Journey ! This is my First Course in Game Development and it is pretty well structured and Gives Good Start to Game Development Career. Thanks David for this Amazing Course.

By Heidi Roux on 11/5/2025

Great information, clear and easy to follow. I appreciated the random humor in the middle of dry moments. It's a LOT to remember all at once and I will def need to review blueprint nodes again. My computer's graphic card and RAM isnt quite good enough to run Unreal Engine without a lot of frustration which was an unfortunate barrier I couldn't fix right away. Still I watched it all carefully and have a good grasp of how it works. I will likely do the intermediate one next. Great class!

By Craig Ohara on 10/29/2025

This is an excellent beginner's course. It has everything you need to know to start from Zero and is not just a blind follow along. It's a course to build enough confidence to start making your own content from scratch. Well done. Wish I'd started my unreal journey here.

By Nathaniel Nesler on 10/28/2025

The instructor went real slow and covered everything in detail. He is good at teaching. He is also technically knowledgeable too given that he has a programming background. I have over a decade of game development experience but I have not been on Unreal since Unreal 3, and I moved from the Unity Engine where I had been on it for over a decade. So for me I just need to know where things are and what they are called which made this course a bit painful because I had to watch a lot of material to get nuggets of information. That said I have been in courses where the instructor was very technically knowledgeable and moved at mock speed which made it super hard to follow them and see what they clicked on and where something was. So a slow course is much better than a mock rocket course when you are trying to find your feet and learn where things are. I think for someone who is a complete beginner to game development this course is the best one I have come across for people who have no background. I think it would be hard to find a better course than this one for a true beginner to game development. So if that is you then get this course and see if you can handle game development, because if you can not handle this course then you can not handle any game development course.

By Homie Santo on 10/5/2025

Really had fun learning and knocking this course out. Had alot of fun and learned quite a bit. This course basically takes you through learning enough of unreal engine to make a 3D platformer and makes everything from scratch: Modeling, Player controller, beginner friendly blueprints, and packaging your first game! Very exciting and now I have a strong foundation to build off of! Thank you so much for this course!

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