Comment by npinsker
9 months ago
I am not familiar with Unreal, but Unity is much faster than programming from scratch, easily 10x or more.
One obvious example is physics behavior, which you can add to your game in under a minute, but with your own engine you'd need a day or two to properly integrate an external library. All the internal state visualization that Noel's showing off here is already built in by default in Unity. It has nice tools to draw and modify bounding boxes, and in the rare cases where the engine's behavior isn't enough, it's highly extensible (using ImGui or Unity's Yoga-based CSS engine, which I prefer). Unity has countless features like this: a sophisticated particle editor, a high-level "write once, run anywhere" shader language with enormous amounts of complexity abstracted away, systems for streaming and keeping track of modular data, and much, much more.
In an ideal world, I'd want to write these things myself, but time ticks away and unfortunately I'd prefer to prioritize finishing games more quickly.
At this point using any engine instead of unity is better. Unity has demonstrated time and again that they cannot be trusted and that you cannot build a game (or business) around them.
Sometimes you have to do business with counterparties you don't trust. It's not mature or practical to take an "all-or-nothing" approach while the engine has virtually no competition for many classes of games.
Building a business fully depending on a party you don't trust sounds kinda delusional.
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Do you have any developer retrospectives around this? Plenty of my favorite games ever made were made with Unity, I wouldn't call those games failures by any means (Cities: Skylines, Overcooked are immediate examples)
The tech is fine, it's more that the last few years has shown some instability over retroactive license changes, questionable acquisitions, and general sentiments over years of seemingly abandoned support in key subsystems.
Disclosure: I used to work at Unity.
At least as far as platformers go, physics feel is a crucial part of the whole experience, and outsourcing to an engine has a good chance of making your game feel cookie-cutter.
> I am not familiar with Unreal, but Unity is much faster than programming from scratch, easily 10x or more.
With the caveat that the editor for Unreal is massive and getting it running requires more resources than Unity, Unreal's Blueprint is a great way of writing gameplay logic. It's accessible to people who don't know C++ or C#, and is a really nice abstraction for async/event driven code. It's a really good place to start with IMO.