Shooter Tutorial: Introduction

Create a Small Game from Scratch: Endless Standing First-Person Shooter

Welcome to the first tutorial in this new series, where I’ll be creating a simple game entirely from scratch. This will be the first tutorial here since the closure of the Shooter Tutorial series. That’s why I’ve chosen to make an endless standing first-person shooter—similar in spirit to Shooter Tutorial.

You can also check out how the old Shooter Tutorial looked.

Some history: Shooter Tutorial was one of the first large-scale tutorial series for Unreal Engine 4. It even received support through the Epic MegaGrants program. However, as the engine evolved, the tutorials became outdated. They were also hosted on my server, which was occasionally hacked—and eventually, I lost access to it altogether. I’ve now decided to start fresh: rebuilding everything from scratch, this time hosted on WordPress and based on the latest version of Unreal Engine 5.

This tutorial is designed for beginners and will use only Blueprints—no C++ and nothing overly advanced. I’ll be working exclusively with free content so that anyone can follow along. I’ll also provide project files with each part. The game will be single-player, as multiplayer introduces complexity that’s not ideal for beginners.

What you’ll learn:

• Basic knowledge of key Unreal Engine classes and architecture
• How to set up a first-person camera
• Input handling for both mouse and gamepad
• Animation Blueprints with procedural animations
• A modular weapon system that supports multiple weapon types
• A damage system
• Basic AI using behavior trees and movement
• Weapon implementation with visual and sound effects (pistol, shotgun, rifle)
• Implementation of three different enemy types
• Inventory system with items
• Procedural level generation using PCG
• Lighting setup (presets) and basic lighting principles
• Creating a game loop: main menu, loading screen, and gameplay map
• Gameplay configuration and balancing
• A scoring system
• UI Manager with layers and stack support
• HUD creation using UMG

So while this game will be simple, it will be a complete and playable experience.

No more long introductions—let’s dive into Part 1: Creating the Main Game Classes.