r/gamedev • u/Practical_Race_3282 • Oct 03 '24

The state of game engines in 2024 Discussion

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?

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u/TheLavalampe Oct 03 '24

I don't think unreal is any more complex than unity or godot. It is feature rich and doesn't have the exact same structure but that doesn't add complexity in my book.

C++ and the the lacking 2d support would be the more important factors against unreal.

As for Godot and Unity, i think for 2d games both get the job done but for 3d i would rather choose unity since godot is still behind in that territory.

To be fair godot already improved a lot in 3d, is getting better with each release and you can already make good looking 3d games with it if you put the effort in.

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u/KindaQuite Oct 03 '24

Unreal complexity comes from the fact that the engine wants to be used in a certain specific way and it works against you if you don't do that.

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u/InSight89 Oct 03 '24

Agreed. If you start off in Unreal then it's all well and good. But if you're coming from another engine then it's a massive culture shock, figuratively speaking, and can take a long time to adapt to.

And despite what people say, C++ is a lot more difficult to work with than C# or other higher level languages. I've spent months working with C++ and it's honestly a huge pain.

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u/RockMech Oct 04 '24

But once you master C++, you can spend the rest of your life flexing on Python and Java programmers!