I’m new to game development and I would like some help with choosing the game engine.
I have some programming experience but that was mostly in python. My friend that is going to make this game with me has a lot more programming experience.
We want to make a turn based dungeon crawler type game similare to Pokemon mystery dungeon.
I’ve played around with unity and unreal engine for a little bit but I can’t decide what game engine to choose and I hope you could help me with choosing.
I know the two game engines have there pros and cons but it is hard to find what would be the best for us.
From what I’ve seen Unreal Engine has more features but unity has a greater asset store.
Unreal Engine looks really nice and it takes a lot less work to make a game look good but unity is faster.
It would be nice if the game could run on a intel Graphics of 4000 but we haven’t decided the hardware requirements yet.
It would be really nice if we could have a highly changeable graphic settings for the game.
There are also a lot of other things that are different with the two game engines.
Hopefully you can help us with choosing the best game engine for us!
Well, plenty of games have been made in Unity that do this kind of thing. I suspect you could do it in Unreal too, but people tend to focus on other things for Unreal. It sounds like, and I could be wrong, you’re pretty new one way or another… so I’d actually say Unity may be the better place to start, as it will be a little easier to do the initial work. again, I never tried to make a game like this in either engine so I should probably not be listened to much
Well thanks for your advice. I’ll look more into it!
Isn’t unreal engine easier to begin with now a days with the blueprint system?
I played around with the engines and I liked unreal engine more than unity
It’s not really a matter of “which engine is better” because that’s all code that you will be creating yourself.
Personally, I’m developing a turn-based strategy in UE4. At a fundamental level, all you need to do is restrict certain types of input at certain times.
-1- If the current player isn’t this player: Only let them move their camera.
-2- If the current player is this player, but they haven’t selected a unit: Let them move the camera and select something (move to -3-).
-3- If the current player is this player, and they have selected a unit: Let them move the camera and select a place to move (move to -4-) OR select a different piece (stay at -3-).
-4- Lock the player camera, perform the animations, unlock the camera, and increment current player, modulo number of players. (This implicitly moves to -1-.)
The game itself is real-time. Time moves on at a regular interval. A turn-based game only locks game-affecting input when it’s not a player’s turn. Again, the engine thinks everything is real time. You are just using a manager class (your GameMode subclass itself or helper object/actor) to only listen to certain things at certain times.
Note: If all players move simultaneously, you would lock the game-affecting input after the player confirms their turn until the turn ends. There’s many subtle differences between turn-based strategies. It all depends on what you had in mind.
You will be required to develop just about all of the gameplay code, and no template exists, but you could totally write a full RPG in Unreal Engine 4.
There isn’t really a whole lot of areas in the engine that are lacking, and many of them are slated for rewrites anyway. I could make arguments about physics (specifically gravity) and audio. Gravity is locked to Z-down and you cannot create zones of differing gravity without modifying the engine source. The “zones of differing gravity” is fairly simple if you want to get something going on characters and projectiles… the physics volume just needs to return a different value with GetGravityZ(). You need to modify CharacterMovementComponent to switch you to Falling if gravity points in the same direction as the floor normal. Won’t work for PhysX actors, though. Epic has already mentioned a few times that they’re intending to work on it, including a few comments here and there about choices that have come up in planning that they’re debating.
As for audio, a few things would be nice. In particularly, a method to process sound samples directly is a glaring omission. Even better if it ran off the main thread. You can do a lot with the built-in node graph, though. Also, audio is listed on Trello as being due for a complete overhaul. What that means? No idea.
But yeah, the point is that these issues are pretty much… edge cases. Chances are, whatever game you want to make, will be just fine in Unreal Engine 4. The argument mostly comes down to the language that you want to use as well as the platforms/performance that you want to target.
I’ve actually used the editor for a bit on on a laptop with an HD 4000 chip. It isn’t hard to make games run at hundreds of frames per second on that GPU, it really only depends on the level of detail you are going for.
Unity can feel less overwhelming to begin with due to its relative simplicity, but IMO that’s about all it has going for it at this point. Also UE4 is still a bit rough around the edges, and occasionally the only documentation is a sample or even the source code. It really helps to be fit with C++, not just to fill in missing parts which Blueprints don’t cover yet, but also to understand the underlying system. It’s not required though, and as long as your game requirements are fairly straight forward, you’ll do just fine with Blueprints. And in terms of productivity, Blueprints are absolutely brilliant. It’s not just the ease at which they are created, but also the fact that it essentially allows real-time editing with no compilation downtime to speak of.
