Should i use Unreal for a 2D Pixel Art game?

Development Platform & Builds Debugging, Optimization, & Profiling
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1

I want to know from you guys which one should i use for such kind of game, Unity or Unreal.
But first, let me tell you what i think of Unreal and Unity for such thing.

First, it seems that pixel perfection can be easily achieved with both, so that’s not a problem.
On the other hand, Paper2D seems really abandoned. It haven’t received an update for years. Unity, on the other hand, has non-stop updates to their 2D system. They got several features to make things easier. But it also seems that if you know what you’re doing, with some c++ you can get all of those important 2D features on Unreal aswell.
A great plus for Unreal is the AI system, which Unity doesn’t seem to have a good one(well, not that i’m aware of).

But it’s a 2D Pixel Art game, and Unity seems to have a much better performance. I got easilty 300fps there, while with unreal i got about 200fps after using flat shading and disabling several post process stuff on the settings(but i didn’t know a lot what i were doing, so i think i could achieve even better performance with Unreal).
Unreal only seems to have one 2D pixel art game, which is The Siege and the Sandfox (which looks amazing, and i’ll definetly play it, since i love stealth games), but it hasn’t even launched yet, while Unity seems to have several products already available, and a lot more on the making.

So far, since i’m much more familiar with Unreal, and Unreal seems like a much better option, because it **seems **that they’re equal if you know what you’re doing on Unreal (and let’s be honest, UE4 > Unity).

But there’s one thing that scares me, and i’d like to know from someone who had some experience with it. The Siege and the Sandfox team or some Epic staff.
I got the feeling that i’ll run into some problems with such game with Unreal, and since Paper 2D it’s pretty much abandoned. And I feel that i won’t have a lot of support if i ever run into some problems. While with Unity, since this kind of game is really common there, if i run into some problem, it either was solved already, or it’ll be easily solved. And since i want to ship this game, i’d like a realistic answer to this issue, and it seems that i won’t find a better place than here to talk about it.

2

Why don’t you use Clickteam Fusion or Gamemaker? They’re much more suitable for 2D games.

3

Because they’re paid and expensive for me.

4

For 2D I, personally, would install MonoGame then add Box2D library and make my own thingy with blackjack & h***kers.
But that because I like to code. If you want to ship as fast as possible then that would be a terrible idea for you.

Unity has more 2D tools than Unreal, which helps finish development faster.
I’d say in case of a “real 2D” game you would use not even 1/3 of Unreal’s features anyway so why have them packaged into your binaries if you ain’t using any of them?!

In my opinion both Unity and Unreal are too much for a 2D game.

5

I’m not part of “he Siege and the Sandfox” team but I have spent quite some time working with Unreal and Paper2D.
My advice is to use whatever fits your needs, don’t use an engine just because it’s cool or because it’s got a lot of features that you will never use.

Unity is much easier to work with, that’s for sure, even if you have never used it before.

Unreal can do pretty much all the standard 2D stuff out of the box with just Paper2D. You might need to code something custom the moment you have a special requirement, but that’s hard to tell without knowing in advance what you’re aiming for.

You might want to have a look at the repo of one of my test projects: GitHub - tanis2000/Unreal-Test2DPlatformer: A test project for a 2D platformer built with Unreal Engin
It uses Paper2D and quite some custom code to make the gameplay feel like an arcade. I use that project to experiment with behavior trees, pathing and all the kind of stuff you’ve probably seen in “The Siege and the Sandfox”. And if you’ve got any questions maybe I can help you.
Cheers!