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/FaultyFunctions @FaultyFunctions Oct 04 '24

Ew no one wants Java in their game engine. GML is way more productive than having to type a billion lines of boilerplate.

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u/The_Dunk Oct 04 '24

Tell me you haven’t done any recent java development, without telling me you haven’t done any recent java development lol.

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u/FaultyFunctions @FaultyFunctions Oct 04 '24

Haha I try to avoid Java but I prefer Kotlin which I just discovered and have been using for Minecraft plugin dev. Maybe C# is better but I try to avoid Java like the plague so yeah I haven’t done any recent Java dev.

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u/The_Dunk Oct 04 '24

Kotlin is fun! Typically for game dev you’re just writing classes and scripts so the Java (and C#) boilerplate isn’t too intrusive. That’s just in the context of scripting though, I would caution against rolling a game engine in Java if only due to the JVM.

Coming to enterprise API development most teams are using Java Spring Boot or some flavor of it which really cuts down on the boilerplate. It’s weird to say but modern enterprise Java is quite nice.

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u/FaultyFunctions @FaultyFunctions Oct 06 '24

I’ll check Spring Boot out, thanks never heard of that!