Should I choose unity?

News & General Discussion
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I would like to start making games as an independent game dev, and I don’t know If I should continue with Unity. I have several 2D games I would like to make, some farming sims, an rpg or two and maybe some smaller ‘practice’ games.

I started learning unity back in lockdown but didn’t get very far, unfortunately life got in the way, but I’d like to try again.
I wasn’t here for the changes or the discourse and frankly I’m finding it very confusing.
It seems like theirs a lot of mistrust towards unity now. I’m not entirely sure if the changes even affect me…

I don’t know much about other Engines except for the fact Unreal Engine scares me and a lot of games coming out on Unreal are really glitchy. idk what engines even work well with 2D.

My only experience in game development is a little bit of unity and well i played RPG maker when I was in high-school if that counts XDDD

If someone could maybe help me out please. Here are some questions I have:

•Should I bother learning unity?

•Can I trust unity?

•Are there other better options?

•Why stay with unity?

•Why leave unity?

Any advice would be appreciated. Also please excuse any spelling mistakes I’m dislexic ^^;

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After 10 years of studying Unity, there are more pros than cons personally for me. I don’t want to list the cons. Let’s focus on the pros:

  1. Learning Unity has never been as easy as it is now. Especially with Unity Learn.
  2. Unity listens to the voice of the community. Example with Unity Runtime Fee.
  3. I saw somewhere tests with Physics recently in Godot and Unity. Unity wins.
  4. A high amount of ready Assets and public knowledge to implement your game faster.
  5. There are not enough competent specialists in the labor market. You can become one.
  6. Unity invests many resources in its development. The development of web services, which are available not only for Unity Game Engine, is particularly attracting attention.
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How important is visual scripting for you?

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Unity is fine engine to learn and use and make games with. But unless you are in a rush I would spent a bit of time with a few engines (e.g., if you are into 2D mostly: Unity, Godot, GameMaker) and do a small game in each (following some bigger tutorial). That will give you a ‘feel’ for the engine. As for your questions:

Should I bother learning unity?

Only you can answer this.

Can I trust unity?

You shouldn’t implicitly trust any company. Companies do what is best for their business. If it happens to be aligned with your interests - that’s great.

Are there other better options?

It depends on your specific needs and your personal preferences.

Why stay with unity?

If you already know Unity and it works for you - keep on using it.

Why leave unity?

If it stopped working for you, you leave. Another thing is that IMO it’s good to know more than one engine. It takes a lot of time to learn an engine (though a lot of concepts and skills are transferable), but learning multiple engines make you better in all of them. And you have options when one of them is no longer good enough for you.

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This, and in addition to those three I would check out Defold.

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Every other engine is a better option, and Unity is a better option to every other engine. You need to find a balance between what you want to accomplish and the time it will take to make it.

Do you know what is better at 2D? Simple HTML5 with Javascript, SVG graphics and CSS animations. It’s super lightweight, will run in every browser, can be converted to mobile apps. The learning curve is similar, but it will be harder to achieve visual effects and physics. I would choose it for simple projects.

But how could you know the difference if you haven’t tried one or the other?

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You can even run it in Unity. :stuck_out_tongue:

Joking aside there are some solid engines made on top of HTML5. Like BabylonJS.

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You should definitely choose Unity. Unity in its current form (6 in particular) is the best the engine has been in years.

-Godot is a hobby project that has good community management
-UE5 is great if you want to achieve a blurry 4k 30fps slideshow on anything less than a $3000 GPU
-I can’t comment on GameMaker functionally, but you’ll find it easier to get professional work with experience in Unity than you will GameMaker.

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Only thing lacking in unity is better world building support and some kind of performance by default. Everything in unity world building and GI is manual.

HDRP is getting there but not ideal for VR or mobile just yet.

Edit: and native origin shifting for multiplayer large map games.

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