Rampant Games - To Swap Game Engines

I love Unity. I’m very, very happy about it. My art guys… well, maybe not so much, but I think it’s more of a matter of what they are used to.

But although this article isn’t favorable towards Unity (it’s not really unfavorable, either), it’s an outstanding discussion of the analysis and challenge of switching game engines – and a little bit of why they chose the Unreal 4 engine in the middle of development.

An Unreal Decision

If I were in their shoes, I might make the same decision. And yeah, that’s me, Unity fanboy. The weird thing is, in two years, the analysis might come out completely differently. A year or two ago, it clearly *did* come out differently.

We live in a strange, new world. Engines have become a commodity within the reach of any indie. Grab ‘em off the shelf at indie prices. They compete in price, features, platforms, intended audience, and style. This is a great thing for game developers at all levels. Okay, maybe for us programmers, who historically were on the front-line of awesome creating the technology (and also making us the bottlenecks), it drops our importance down a few pegs. You know what? I’m okay with that. I’ve been okay with games not being tech-driven for many years.

I made the painful and expensive decision to switch to Unity rather than the upgrade of the Torque engine for the sequel to Frayed Knights. This meant having to rewrite a ton of code, and learn a whole new way of doing things. That took time. But I don’t regret that decision, at all. And I’ve had to let a ton of sunk costs go (including about a year of work).

I’m still sticking with Unity for the foreseeable future. Unity 5 is promising some new new features to compete on several fronts, and I’m sure the leading competitors will offer some outstanding improvements to match. It’s a win / win for me.

Click to expand...

DArtagnan said:

I've yet to see a game released that was made with Unity that doesn't run like crap, compared to what it's doing.

This includes Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun Returns - both of which could be considered quite professional.

Click to expand...

Humanity has risen! said:

I also guess that now engines have reached a state where even the ones that target low end machines like Unity (which can be used to make easy mobile phone ports) have graphics which are good enough for most games, especially indie ones. I played The Golf Club, which is based on Unity, and it's also on next-gen consoles like PS4 and Xbox One, and looks good.

Unity has supposedly a very easy and thorough development environment, but optimization is a wholly different beast.

Click to expand...