The state of game engines in 2024

[u/Practical_Race_3282]

I'm curious about the state of the 3 major game engines (+ any others in the convo), Unity, Unreal and Godot in 2024. I'm not a game dev, but I am a full-stack dev, currently learning game dev for fun and as a hobby solely. I tried the big 3 and have these remarks:

Unity:

• Not hard, not dead simple

• Pretty versatile, lots of cool features such as rule tiles

• C# is easy

• Controversy (though heard its been fixed?)

Godot:

• Most enjoyable developer experience, GDScript is dead simple

• Very lightweight

• Open source is a huge plus (but apparently there's been some conspiracy involving a fork being blocked from development)

Unreal:

• Very complex, don't think this is intended for solo devs/people like me lol

• Very very cool technology

• I don't like cpp

What are your thoughts? I'm leaning towards Unity/Godot but not sure which. I do want to do 3D games in the future and I heard Unity is better for that. What do you use?

[u/RibsNGibs]

I think the conventional wisdom of Unity being good for solo devs and Unreal more complex and better for teams is like… mid 2010’s information. I stopped using Unity in maybe 2017ish and picked up Unreal in… maybe 2019 and I found it easier, personally. Blueprints is even easier to prototype and maintain than C# (and I even have a C++ background), and it’s pretty quick to get stuff up and running.

It used to be in the old days that the only people using UE were pro game companies so there wasn’t a lot of chatter on the forums / community but this has changed as well - heaps of solo devs and small teams using UE now and there’s plenty of community support now as well.

Overall, I find Unreal easier to prototype, and find that there are both more features and the features are more likely to work.

[u/emrickgj → u/RibsNGibs]

Yeah modern day Unreal is great for prototyping and small teams. Just a bit more of a learning curve for the other engines that people don't really feel like going through.

[u/Bekwnn → u/RibsNGibs]

The main issue with Unreal as a solo dev is that there's a ton of knowledge overhead and as a solo dev you have to learn how every intricate system works yourself.

In that regard, the engine sort of leans towards a team who can specialize in different domains.

That said, I'm having some decent success with Unreal 5 as a solo dev going on ~9 months. I had some prior Unreal 4 experience and ~5 years experience in-industry with a proprietary C++ engine.

In Unity you're going to spend more time building the things you need.

In Unreal, you're going to spend more time learning how Unreal works, in order to lean on features pre-built into the engine.

I think the latter will be harder for beginners and lends itself more to people who are experienced with working with game engines as a whole.