Many years ago, I investigated what it would take to use the Unreal Engine to build a game with my friends. Licensing was prohibitive, the tools and development paradigm was complex, in short, I was pretty discouraged about that avenue and did not pursue it any further at the time. I chose rather, to focus my energies in other areas of research & development.
Enter Visual Studio 2015, and a project template category titled ‘Game’. Therein I found three items:

• Unity
• Unreal
• Cocos

So of course, I pursued, and next was this:

The Unreal Engine template and tooling install for Visual Studio Community 2015 with Update 1

I was very pleased with the new Community Edition Visual Studio 2015 btw, it also has its Blend counterpart, and seems a really nice upgrade of my favorite and most familiar development tool of all.

Next, there was a surprise…installation was complete, but no “Unreal” template was found in the ‘Game’ template category of Visual Studio 2015 – I assumed a bug, or something corrupted, but in fact, the shortcut that had appeared on my desktop was not just to a website, but to the Unreal Engine install:

Unreal Engine Installer downloading and installing the Unreal Engine v4.10.4

This was beginning to look very interesting indeed…and then the Unreal Engine completed its download, and I was presented with the following:

Unreal Engine Editor Project Dialog

Ka-boom! Yay! This was an exciting thing to see…almost as much as what came next:

Launching The Unreal Engine Editor

The out-of-the-box game templates are incredible, and incredibly easy to use and get started with!

Unreal Editor 3rd Person Game Template

Here’s what I got ‘for free’ – amazing!

Needless to say…it is a VERY exciting time to be a developer!

I will try to get some Unreal Engine developmentwalk-throughs going as I go. In the meantime, if you haven’t already, get your copy of Visual Studio Community 2015 with Update 1, and start making your way through the available project templates and updates to start becoming familiar with all the amazing new capabilities and possibilities.

Happy coding!