Comment by throwawayffffas
9 months ago
For anything I have ever tried to make, I always find myself fighting the engine. Whether it is Godot, Unity or Unreal.
They all feel like a ready made game that you add assets and mod. The problem for me is that I mostly don't want to make that game.
An analogy that comes to mind from the web dev world, it feels like the engines are like wordpress. Prebaked and ready to show content, but the moment your objective does not completely align with their preconfiguration you have to do a huge amount of hacking and workarounds.
What adds oil to the flame is a bunch of "game templates" that you can buy and make your own game just by replacing the title screen and some models. E.g. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/systems/stor...
And if you open Steam games and go to the newest, you see that nearly half of the releases is some version of a generic Unity/Unreal template game in a slightly altered "skin":
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2488370/Cash_Cleaner_Simu...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2073910/A_Webbing_Journey...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3498270/Better_Mart/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2625420/Drive_Beyond_Hori...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3163790/Toy_Shop_Simulato...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3023600/Horse_Farm_Simula...
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3124550/Liquor_Store_Simu...
Ha, if I remember correctly the squad military sim was a reskinned first person demo from epic games.
Exactly. If you want your game to look exactly like every other game on Google Play, complete with all the same, long, janky splash screens and rendering hitches and slightly screwy text rendering and random audio glitches, use Unity.
All that might be acceptable for an adware befouled "idle RPG" style game on mobile (and they're all that kind of game these days). But it really galled me that people were using Unity so heavily for VR. It's extremely difficult to get a Unity game to work well on the standalone VR headsets. To hit the performance targets required by the Meta Quest Store, you really have to rewrite large portions of the engine to get around the fact that Unity is a disorganized, single-threaded, allocation-happy mess.
If you want your game to be a quality piece of software, you can't start with a garbage as your foundation.
There are games in many different genres, many different aesthetics, many different amounts of polish, and many diffrent levels of performance… all made with Unity. It’s true that they provide a bunch of baseline stuff so that low effort games look and feel similar, but it’s not that hard to end up with game made in Unity that feel unique.