A look at Unity and UE4 from the perspective of a complete gamedev noob.

As promised, here's the gamedev note on Unity and UE4 :)

Tea or coffee?
Cats or dogs?
Black or white?
Unity or Unreal Engine 4?

These are the questions that have plagued man since the dawn of time, with the possible exception of maybe the last one. And the answer sort of lies in personal preference. So, dear reader, how do you like your caffeinated water/animal companions/arbitrary colours/free game Engines? Here's my short take on it.

I've got about a year of experience in Unity, so I'd like to think that I'm fairly competent in it, however, I have to admit that I'm far from it. Over the past week, I installed Unreal Engine 4, for the heck of it, just to take a look, and was completely blown away. One of the major advantages that UE4 has over its competitor is the sheer amount of out-of-the-box support that it offers completely new users. I was able to set up a first person controller in minutes, via a drag and drop operation. To do the same thing in Unity, I spent twenty minutes finding a decent tutorial, and ended up following a sixty-minute tutorial on how to fire lasers with a LineRenderer instead in order to set up a halfway-decent one that didn't use deprecated syntax. Another big plus was the ability to run tutorials in-editor (a major godsend - no more concentration-breaking Alt-Tabbing between the Editor and a Youtube window every few seconds. However, a scrollbar and some resizability options should be added to the tutorial window so it doesn't take up more than half of the 3D Viewport when you're following it.

Of course, this isn't to say that there aren't any problems with UE4. I do see some potential difficulties in changing the existing resources so that they'll work the way you want them to, if your intended purpose is outside the very narrow limits set by the blueprints you're using, given that I've been doing tutorials for the better part of a week, and I'm yet to see a single line of code. In Unity, I was set up and coding within two hours of starting the very first tutorial.

All this is not to say that either engine is inferior. I'm simply stating the facts as I see them, from the perspective of a complete newbie. I'm sure that, to an experienced developer, the choice between Unity and UE4 is pretty arbitrary, but to me, a guy with barely two and a half games under his belt, UE4 is the clear winner when it comes to support for new users. Don't crucify me for expressing an opinion.

Given the simplicity afforded by UE4, I'm even considering making a simple FPS demo myself, maybe with a friend to make some simple models for me. Expect to see some work on props and such soon!