Some of you probably followed GDC last week and know we will now be able to develop on the above game engines for free. If someone wanted to learn the ropes of game making, perhaps just for fun or perhaps with an eye to developing and selling small indie games in the future on PC which one might they develop on? I think Unreal and Unity have both been shown to be pretty flexible in the types of games they can be used to make but I don't know specifics about best suitability for the different genres, and I don't know much about Source 2 at all. Am I right in thinking Unity has a reputation for ease of picking up? Does it have more documentation etc. then Unreal for the beginner? I am sure there are many people on here who are far more savvy about this issue than me and I was just wondering what your thoughts were in general with regards to the strengths and weaknesses of these engines. Cheers! Edit: These two articles have helped me a touch: http://blog.digitaltutors.com/unity-udk-cryengine-game-engine-choose/ http://blog.digitaltutors.com/unreal-engine-4-vs-unity-game-engine-best/ Been a long time since I have coded anything. I might look at the new Unreal Tournament being made. I think it is being community assisted fairly extensively. Perhaps map making might be a focused place to start. I played Q1, Q2 and some of the earlier Unreal Tournaments heavily and to a fairly high standard so have a few ideas on what makes a decent map.
Unity 5 would by far be the best engine for you because of ease of use. That's such a big plus for Unity in your situation that even if the others ran at twice the speed I'd still recommend it
If Source 2 is anything like the current Dota 2 SDK then I'm interested. Otherwise, not enough to go on.
Just to throw it out there, if your interested specifically in rts development there is always the spring engine
Thanks for everyone's thoughts. I think Unity 5 probably is the best bet as early projects would be relatively small and simple so I wouldn't need the power of the Unreal Engine, though I may look at that later as its user friendliness is meant to have come a long way in the latest version.
All of them will have advantages over the other. There is no one perfect engine. Anyone who attempts to persuade you otherwise will simply be doing so from a biased perspective. Unity used to be quite far behind Unreal, but that gap has pretty much closed, especially with the advances Unity 5 brings to the table. Source 2 should be competently put-together in a way that benefits new developers as well as veterans. They're all solid options. I just moved from Unity 3.5 (herp derp) to Unreal 4 myself; the option of a free version of UE4 complete vs. upgrading to another free / personal edition of Unity was too easy to make.
this is what it comes down to. It depends on what you want. as @cdrkf pointed out, if it's an RTS forget all three and go for spring (free as well) (although by now I'm DYING to know what a large scale RTS would look like on unreal). source is the most stable with no problems handling complex situations that would potentially make the other engines crash or would just be unsupported. unreal has the most inclusive graphical capabilities. i'm not quite sure what unity's advantage is since source now also runs on linux.
My major at university was Mandarin, if I was smarter than I am, designing an interactive educational game to learn the language, which is growing in popularity, might be interesting to make and sell a few copies with directed PR. More likely though I would first try and re-create and then perhaps improve on the first game I ever bought as a child for £25 on an old floppy disk. Price seems ridiculous for then perhaps, but it was well worth it. It was a simple but very satisfying turn based strategy game. Biggest problem with any game is the Art side as I am hopeless at that. I have a self-employed friend in advertising and he designs an idea and then has people who create it in places like Thailand or the Philippines (after going back and forward a few times). Does something exist like that for the non-artisticly inclined developer in the gaming world?
you mean infographic freelancers? yeah I guess. you should find a freelancer (or just team up with an infographist) that also speaks mandarin, though. otherwise you'll end up with confusions on his part that may ultimately end up in the game because of lack of time and budget. i did an internship as a kid at Milan Press, in their mobi-click department (educational games) they were making an English learning release. they passed me the text, just in case, they where pretty confident. ..... oh my god... don't wanna see what their other releases on english where like before me and after i'd left....
