Is it worth spending time on GLSL and OpenGL in the days of Unreal Engine 4?

Question

IT education

I want to move from web development to game dev. So far, I have set a goal to try to develop a couple of simple mobile clicker games with Flappy birds complexity. In my student years, I played with C ++, I even know the base a little bit. Now I’m reading Lippmann’s book on C ++ and at the same time I’m watching OpenGL courses, but I find myself thinking that OpenGL is not the most demanded skill today, it’s a low-level language that allows you to work with graphics, but it’s hardly worth thinking that someone will write a game in it without using the engine. On the other hand, I heard something about Unreal Engine 4, there are many courses on it, it already has all the tools to develop a simple game. And so the question actually arose, should I continue to study OpenGL in the context of C ++ and delve into the shader language or do people need these tools, who is directly involved in the development of game engines? I like OpenGL and enjoy learning it, but I don't want to waste time on something that will be useless. The goal, in the end, is just the development of simple mobile games.

Answer 1

At a minimum, you will understand what is under the hood of high-level tools and can make better use of abstractions from the engine.