24 Hour Make a Game Challenge

Hello World! 

Recently, my curiosity for the potential of Unreal Engine got the better of me as I fell down the YouTube rabbit hole of indie games and solo projects developed in the engine. It looked promising, and honestly I was inspired by what I saw, so I decided to give it a shot and see if UE4 would become my engine of choice for my prophesized masterpiece game. I'm a little crazy so I decided to jump in head first and challenge myself to make a "CoMpLeTe GamE" in 24 hours of work. Obviously you can't truly understand an engine with such little time using it, but I hold fast that this approach was truly enlightening and I now have an understanding of what the engine is good for, and more importantly what it isn't.

All in all it was a great learning experience, I feel like I got to see many sides of the massive puzzle that is Unreal really quickly. And there were quite a few really neat features that made certain things incredibly easy, comparatively speaking from other platforms. However, there are just as many, if not more features that were either needlessly complicated or downright absent. So (you didn't ask for my opinion but you're getting it anyway (: ) I've come to the conclusion that the engine is too unruly for small projects like what I am interested in making, and the benefits of using UE4 (a la blueprints, widgets, etc) are not significant enough to make me want to continue with banging my head against my desk every 30 minutes when I inevitably get stuck.

Honestly, I'm incredibly disappointed with the lack of 2d support. Even just a simple flipbook is so feature incomplete that it doesn't give you access to the array of sprites it already contains, AND you can't use a flipbook in a hud widget... which is absurd because you have a daunting amount of control over literally every other aspect of a widget which otherwise made UI's a joy to create.

Anyway, the search continues for the perfect canvas on which to paint my own Mona Lisa