Continue with Unity or Unreal...

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1

Hi all,

I’ve had a bit of an interesting dilemma today and I wanted some Unity users opinions.

Feel free to read my biography below, but the TLDR is this.

2 months of Unity, I’ve enjoyed it. Unreal seems like it has more features but is well resource heavy. Blueprints are a major win as I don’t know how to code. Would unreal be more transferable in a job?

For my autobiography… Read on.

About 2 months ago I started using Unity and have been enjoying using. I come from a 3d background but wanted to get into solo indie development. I went with Unity as Unreal seemed to be the choice for higher fidelity, AAA pipelines whereas Unity seemed much better suited to indie development. At least from my own research.

I followed the Unity official learning path tutorials on the basics and the junior programmer learning C# and although not all of sunk it, I did enjoy it and was keen to continue with some Game Dev TV tutorials and make a short walking simulator type game of my own.

However…

Over the last few days I’ve watched a few interesting dev logs and feature videos of things in Unreal that have definitely caught my eye. I decided to take a couple of days playing around in unreal but have walked away feeling just as unsure.

I liked Unity because it was very easy to pick up. The asset store and the community was awesome from what I’ve seen so far. However, the recent change of licensing seems to have thrown everyone’s trust, plus you need pro license for shipping to console.

Unreal seems to be a wise choice as its licensing plan is much more straight forwards, it’s more feature rich and some might say future proof.

The other aspect is that from a artistic point of view, blueprints seem to be second to none in terms of being able to be code or program.

The biggest draw back though I’ve found which is greatly putting me off is that it is so incredibly resource heavy. I’ve got a decent PC, given a fair few years old but I’ve had to use the scalability settings just to get the editor at an acceptable usability. And even then, it feels slow and sluggish. Plus the marketplace seems poor in comparison with many more paid assets over free.

Sorry for the rant, but I’m not sure what’s best to do. Gut is telling me to use Unity, but the harder, long term decision I feel is unreal.

Many thanks for anyone that got to the end.

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Decide for yourself. The information is out there, and we can’t tell you what’s best. Nor do we need another rant.

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3

use the one that fits your workflows and requirements…

there’s godot also, or can test visual scripting in unity too. (but of course UE is more advanced there)

4

Remember unity has visual programming too

if you are only 2 months in you will have barely scratched the surface. Like learning a music instrument if you are not in that way of thinking it takes a long time to be good.

5

Spend 2 months with Unreal as well, then decide.

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6

Blueprints can be a solution if you’re struggling with the text aspect of coding, but it might not be the solution you think it is if you’re struggling with the flow and logic behind coding. Learning to think like a programmer is typically the hardest part of programming.

That said Blueprint may make it easier to pick these up if you learn better with visuals than with text. You can try the ones for Unity if you want but they’re far less capable and have far less performance than Blueprint.

It’s editor defaults to a high setting but you can turn down the visual quality quite easily.

YouTube tutorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMUcCTXJ6ic

You still want a decent machine but that applies to Unity too. I’ve worked on standalone, mobile, and console games and processor, memory, and graphics card usage while in the editor can quickly ramp up even if you’re targeting a low end platform. Especially if you’re running content creation tools simultaneously.

Both are valuable but being able to pick up a new game engine (and new tools in general) in a short period of time is more valuable. An experienced developer should be able to switch from one engine to another in a few weeks or less. They won’t be an expert but they don’t need to be to get started with using it.

7

Many good answers here, thank you all. After dabbling in a bit of everything, Playmaker included. I think learning C# and some visual scripting in Unity will be my preference. Thank you again.

2 Likes
8

Imo blueprints and code are not much different. A person still needs to learn all of the pertinent elements to add functionality.

If unreal barely runs on your PC though, it seems like the choice is kind of made for you, right?

Best of luck whatever your choose

I’m editing this to say, “oops, didn’t realize you already made your decision”