Introduction

Hello, in this blog post, I’m sharing my personal experience with 3 different game engines of my choice. I’ll go over what I liked, what I didn’t, and their qualities as their individual game engine. This is not a technical review but rather my own opinions based on using them in different projects. I’ve also included images and other visuals to help explain some of my points.

Along with that, I would like it to be very known that I am in no way a professional coder or a professional game developer currently, as of writing this I am still in school and am still learning, so listen to my opinions as if I knew what the concepts are, but are unable to use them in any significant way.

Also, for each of these, I used a tutorial guide that I believed I was skilled enough to complete, as I am not currently knowledgeable enough in every game engine to make my own game.

Overview of Game Engines Covered

The game engines I decided to try out were Godot, Unity, and Unreal Engine. I initially wanted to do 5 game engines, but I realised I didn’t have enough time or energy to make 5 different games in 5 different game engines, so I settled for trying to make 3 games.

Currently, my experience with the three game engines has been a bit touch and go, as I have never really started a project of my own to really build my skills, though I will most certainly do that in the future.

When it comes to the features that each game engine has, please view the infographic below.

As you can see, each engine has its strengths and features that make it stand out compared to its fellow rivals. Also, I would like to point out the 5% Royalty Fee that Unreal Engine 5 has, as it only comes into effect once the said game IP brings in over 1 million dollars in revenue. So if you were worried about getting your profits taken by Epic Games, then I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.

Unity

Firstly, I will talk about Unity, as it was one of the two game engines that I was unfortunately unable to complete in time for this blog. My previous experience with Unity was the least compared to Godot and Unreal, so I did sort of expect this could happen, but I was always being told by my fellow developers that Unity would be easy to handle, so being unable to complete the project was a bit of a shock.

I believe the reason for my inability to complete this project is due to my inexperience as a developer, along with my unwillingness to put forth more effort. But, along with that, I believe that unity has changed far too much from before. Clearly, at some point, Unity became just different enough, where a new user would see that the old videos they could’ve used, like Brackey’s or someone like that, are no longer viable, as Unity has evolved so far.

While I was using it, I encountered weird things happening all the time, like my code consistently not working even when I used a tutorial, along with textures going missing and turning pink even though I had just imported them. I found it to be very odd, and I could only chalk it up to the age of the assets I was using, along with the code for Unity changing over the years, which led to older code being deprecated.

Also, Unity has fallen out of favor with the developer community due to a very large scandal with the company’s policy. I think this has led to a major change in how Unity is now, where there is becoming scarcer and scarcer information on how to use Unity correctly as Unity continues to update.

Overall, I would rank Unity out of the three the lowest, as I not only lost track of what I was doing, but was unable to even run the game as the compiler kept bugging out on me. This is as far into the project as I was able to get. If you want to try to make it yourself, then you can follow this tutorial by Charger Games.

Godot

Now, Godot was where I got disappointed in my skills, as I thought it was going to be very easy to pick up and learn. Unfortunately, this is the second game engine I was unable to complete, this is mostly due to the fact that I was unable to get the tilemaps to work properly.

I think something that I don’t like about Godot and Unity is the fact that you have to put in your assets for almost everything. Like, when it came to that tutorial I used for the Unity engine, I had to import my grass texture and my ball. The same goes for Godot, I had to find a asset pack that I could use and then fumble around trying to make it work, only to realise the specific tiles that I want to place are not in the correct height on the TileMap, so when I try to place them one of them is going to be floating somewhere where I wouldn’t want it to.

Overall, I feel like I will like using Godot, it does not seem complicated to use, really it’s just that I got stuck on an issue I was unable to fix myself (and also apparently no information I found online was able to help me as well) and so I got in a position where I was doomed.

This is as far as I got with Godot. If you want to try and figure it out for yourself, the tutorial I used is below.

Unreal Engine

Finally, at the very end, there is Unreal Engine. I have to say, out of the 3 engines I used, Unreal Engine is BY FAR the easiest one I used. There were no compiling errors, there was no placing in assets from some random place, and there was no getting stuck because you couldn’t figure out how to enable a single feature.

The entire time I used Unreal Engine, I felt like I knew what I was doing and what functions I was creating. It really felt like I would be able to use the skills I learned from the tutorial and tweak them to make a game of my own.

Along with that, it was the ONLY game that I was able to finish, and so, I will show you the gameplay of the Unreal Engine tutorial.

Along with that, it even has a functioning lose screen if you don’t collect all the orbs in time.

Unreal Engine was the only one that worked practically flawlessly the moment I used it, and for that, I am most surely planning to use it as my main game engine.

If you want to make the game I crafted, then please watch Render Bucket’s video on it, as he is an excellent teacher.

Conclusion

Now that I have tried 3 different game engines, I don’t really need to have quite an open-ended conclusion statement. In the end, after all, the only one that worked for me was Unreal, and so if you do try one, then I recommend using it first, as it is incredibly easy to pick up and use. If another one works for you while you’re coding, then by all means, you should use it, but I was unable to get any of the others to work the way I wished they would.