I have seen horrible things. The other game engines… oh god why? I guess I should start at the beginning.
A few weeks ago, I returned from the depths of as nowhere as one can be and having been under a rock for so long, a lot had changed with Unity in my absence. I noticed a new splash screen that in my opinion (probably fact) looks very unprofessional. It seemed to me that Unity had gone down a dark path. Long ago it was stated from Unity themselves that there is no Unity free version, it’s Unity standard and Unity Pro. That was then.
It looked to me like I was going to be forced to shovel out the cash or have my game branded with that unwanted splash screen. So, I left. I decided there had to be another viable alternative to Unity. I felt that Unity finally had become too powerful of a company for its own good.
Esenthel (C++ Variant, Subscription based, roughly $15/m):
I went small at first. I found that over the years Esenthel was still going. It had continued to survive and update in spite of being basically just one guy behind it. I evaluated it and I actually liked a lot about it. Some aspects of it were alien to me, but it had some features I actually liked more than unity. I did a lot of tutorials, but they ran dry after a while and I was still struggling with the work flow of how I put together character classes, character objects and the other scripts that detail the stats and types of the characters. This part was convoluted to me. The tutorials lacked explanations on too many important things. Also, I feared that if anything happened to the creator(s?) of this program, updates would cease forever. Still I wish Esenthel the best of luck. I needed to move on.
Unreal Engine 4: (C++ Variant, Blueprint Visual Scripting, Free to download, 5% royalty):
I felt somewhat at home here. At first everything seemed really nice, in fact too nice. It was fast, beautiful, the world building is great IMO, and the UI was intuitive and nicely laid out. I liked the big bold letters in the editor and the way everything felt solid and well put together. Now I just needed to script something. I opened the first object to see what made it tick, it was a blueprint, a visual node based scripting system. People love this system BTW. I am not one of those people. I hate node scripting, I think it’s cancer. I found limited resources on how to use C++ with Unreal. Their First person tutorial was alright I suppose, but it wasn’t robust enough to really grapple programing with UE4. There should be way more tutorials. The ones I find for C++ usually seem to de-evolve into blueprint tutorials midway. The truth is, it’s hard to use UE4 without blueprint.
Cry Engine 5.x: (C++? C#?, Flowgraph Visual Scripting, 100% free, or pay what you want):
Cryengine which had for so long been considered to be a powerful engine out of reach to anyone less than a grand wizard elite programmer was now trying to make themselves more accessible. The best way to do this? Node based visual scripting I guess? They seem to think that you need artists to program games to make people use your engine? I was greeted with bugs on top of bugs right as I started, but their support was very helpful in resolving them, so I could look past the bugs, the support was a big plus for me. I found working in the editor to be perplexing at first. It doesn’t start a scene with a default camera I guess, just where ever you are in the editor is where you pop in to the editor. There was a lot of confusion about what the best practice was for… everything. Is what I’m doing for the editor or in the game? It was messy to me. I decided to continue my search.
Shiva 3D 1.9.2 : (Lua, C++ I think, $200 for basic, 1K for pro, but you can’t buy it):
These guys are still going, even after their company was liquidated. I have to give them credit, they believe in what they are doing. They have an awkward interface that turns away most prospective users and a poor business model. But, I don’t care about that, I care about the engine and how I will code. Right away I found myself coding in Shiva with this bizarre Lua language. It all felt weird, but it worked. They have a lot of good tutorials and documentation too, but it can be hard to find because their website seems to be in a state of slow change. You can’t just buy a license, you need to request one and if they get back to you they might sell you one I guess. In the meantime you can use the limited free version that lets you export only to web. I could try to work with these guys, but it seems a pain. But, if this is what I need to use then so be it. First, not that I intend to go crawling back to Unity, but let me go back one last time to check their pricing model, I think I forgot to do that, it’s still free and 120/month last time I checked I think…
Unity: (C#, JavaScript Variant, Free, 35/m, 125/m, more):
Wait… they have a new model, 35/m? No stupid splash screen? I guess that’s a reasonable compromise… and I already know Unity very well… When I consider the time it will take to learn a new editor, language etc, and time is money, this option really is the best for me. So, I guess Unity wins, like it always knew that it would. But, still, I warn you all. If Unity continues to grow in power, a day will come when they start to do dumb things and we cannot do anything about it because they control everything in the indie game world. I watched the UE4 guys give a presentation at a college and they were nervous and shaky and they tried to pitch their product, they didn’t used to be that way in the past, it’s because they know they are the small fish now. There is no real competition to Unity when it comes to the Indie market. Yeah, their going to get my money, they win. I give up. All I can hope now is that I don’t get a hot iron to my face for trying to run away.
