Unreal

As I mentioned in the last post, I decided to work on this game in Unreal. Despite the explosion in popularity of Unity, I'd still argue that Unreal is the premiere AAA game engine out there. Tons of games use it, many developers can be hired with Unreal experience, and entire studios dedicate themselves to it. Now that Unreal has gone fully free, it can even compete for the indie and hobbyist mindshare.

That said, I know very little about it. I've fired it up here and there, especially when I worked on game tools, but I had zero practical experience with it.

It would've been very easy to develop this in Unity. I had already built a sort of tactics game for a game jam in Unity a few years back, and I'm comfortable with its paradigm. But if the point of this exercise was to stretch my wings, I would get a lot more by learning Unreal in the process.

Now that I'm a bit into this project, I can also say I'm so far very happy with this decision. The Blueprint Editor is surprisingly excellent, I'm actually having fun making materials, and having full access to engine code changes how I work and debug. There are also some easy engine components, such as pathfinding, that is changing how I was planning on building this game.

While I still stand by Unity's excellence, Unreal so far has shown me why it's been king for so long.