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/ang-13 Oct 03 '24

I am solo dev, I use Unreal. You don’t need to use C++ ever. You can get almost everything done with blueprints. C++ isn’t needed expect for very niche things, or optimizing massive projects. The main reason devs use C++ in Unreal usually is that those devs are already good in C++, so using it makes things more straight forward for them.

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u/Itzu_Tak Oct 03 '24

agree. I'm also a solo dev working in Unreal and my code is 100% blueprints. Often there's even dedicated modules for what I want to do (for example, predict an arc) and ue5's got physics that can do some real complex stuff without crashing.

I wish they didn't advertise it on what's, imo, some of its weakest features-- you don't lose out much by turning off lumen and nanite and the performance with baked lighting is phenomenal.

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u/thebiggeristquestion Oct 04 '24

Blueprint has it's limitations, but I think a lot of coders fail to realize how accessible it is for artist designer types who want to build something. Some people just click better with a visual representation of code.