Best Game Engine: Battleroyale! (Unity vs Godot vs Unreal vs GMS2)

everyone has ambition that the current them just isn't capable of video games even simple ones tend to become one of those ambitions so we use game engines vehicles capable of taking us further than we could ever go with our strength alone yet just like shopping for a car just picking one is a journey within itself years ago the best indie game engine was unity and unity has only gotten better over the years but the competition is fiercer than game of thrones and the crown that's been snuggled up on unity's head isn't as well guarded as it once was rather than defending their throne unity has been trying to expand their kingdom they improved the engine created a plethora of different packages and expanded towards the automotive industry nope it's right the automotive industry unity's efforts to expand to the land of hyundai and ford while building the data-oriented technology stack turned the engine into a boiling pot of pure chaos which made the kingdom susceptible to an invasion so other kingdoms began taking some the land a unity had worked so hard to obtain a good example und used to have the most generous license for a viable game engine fast forward to the modern day godot exists and it's free like super free like you spend zero dollars free like stop looking for the strings pinocchio you're a real boy free on top of that unrails license is now even better for indies than unities was when you look into this it gets pretty dramatic unreal basically change their license so that you don't have to give them money until you make a million dollars a year in reaction to unity's license which is you don't have to give them money until you make a hundred thousand dollars a year day 10x unity on top of that epic the game company behind unreal engine gave godot unity's main free 2d competition a bunch of money the game industry is looking pretty cutthroat which is kind of nice for us because our place in this relationship is basically you boys gonna fight over the lonely i really need to find a more relatable analogy moving on value is only one variable of many when it comes to picking a game engine and kind of like finding waldo sometimes having too many variables contributing to your decision actually stops you from getting to the answer so we'll be focusing in on a few key factors precisely engines that excel at certain types of games their learning curves and how complete the toolboxes are for making games then i'm going to give you the secret sauce a secret blend of herbs and spices that'll help you regardless of which engine you pick so let's discuss which engine rules over which lands so you can get out there plot your core stick your flag into the ground and conquer your way into game dev glory if you were to ask me to simplify this entire choice to one crucial factor it would be graphics after all game engines are like a relay race where a large team has done part of the work of making the game and they pass the baton onto you so you don't have to work with a large team which is really important to some of us because some of us have no friends come on come on toughen up perhaps the largest benefit in terms of work hours that's been done for you inside of a game engine is the graphics so a lot of picking a game engine can be decided by whether you are making 3d games 2d games or both if your answer is both then i would like to present unity as the leonardo da vinci of game engines now just to put this in context for all those that think good old leo's resume only has the mona lisa on it he also painted the last supper he pieced together a lot of anatomy through borderline necromancy he almost invented a bicycle several interesting war machines and a helicopter and he is one of the reasons why we use the term renaissance man to mean a multi-talented individual now unity is basically the renaissance engine it is good at both 2d and 3d so if you want your skills to go across to both then it's likely the best engine for you some of you might be questioning if godot might also fit this it depends on how far you're going with the 3d unt is the better choice most of the time and it gets pretty technical as to why and i don't even fully understand it because i'm not a game engine developer however the gist is this the way that engines develop graphics is through the use of a graphics api like directx or opengl now different operating systems work better with different apis directx being a microsoft solution means that it works better with windows metal being an apple solution means that apple products tend to work better with it in fact in some cases apple products will only work with metal in other words if you want the best 3d performance then you need to have a way for your engine to utilize the correct api for the correct device unity unreal and most other large engines have that ability godot does not it's coated with one api opengl and it will move to vulcan but even then we're not sure if it's going to be able to contend with the other engines which already have vulkan capabilities now in the 2d world performance is a lot easier to obtain so we don't need to worry about this as much alright let's forget the technicalities and sum this up leonardo da vinci was a beast and unity is most likely the best choice if you want to work with both 2d and 3d now if two dimensions just isn't enough to tickle your game making fancy then the game engine you want to use becomes a little more complicated more game engines will come out for the challenge than a fresh load of super smash brothers but if you weed through all the competition based on the engines that are battle tested in the indie community and you also filter them based on if they have a large enough community built around them to teach you how to use that engine because let's be honest none of us are going to read the documentation that leaves unreal and unity as the two real contenders a year or two from now cryengine unigine or godot might actually offer some real competition but for now in 2020 the real choices are unity and unreal with unity being able to do 2d as well why would you not pick unity over unreal if i were to go in depth into all the reasons that would be a video in of itself so here's the bullet point version unity is the least complete engine that i'm talking about today please understand me you can make a complete game with unity no problem when you compare the engine against other engines it is lacking a lot of tools that others come with out of the box unt is catching up by working on visual scripting and finally including a shader graph but they still lack behavior trees 2d pathfinding and a big thing for some reason unity technologies just cannot maintain a networking solution their track record is starting to become embarrassing fingers crossed the dot solution is in preview and it will hopefully be good but you might want to look into third-party solutions if you're going for a multi-player game or you might want to go with unreal another point unity takes more work to get the same results they don't have beautiful graphics without some tinkering whereas unreal you make the game and it's pretty period alright so this is what i would achieve in unity after spending like i don't know like 20 minutes which i did in two minutes in ue4 which might be the fruition of some underlying design principle for both companies because a lot of unity implementations tend to make things more difficult for the developer rather than easier dots descriptible rendering pipeline and the new input system all require learning new workflows to gain the new advantages whereas unreal introduces features like nanite which allows you to forget about polycounts in other words unreal engine just does more work and you do less over time unreal has a lot going for it in the 3d world it is far better tested in all things aaa meaning the better graphics you are using the more likely something similar has been made with unreal engine blueprints the visual scripting solution in unreal is a first-class citizen of the unreal engine you're meant to make games with it it's built and maintained by epic so it's probably the best out of the box visual scripting solution in the 3d world if visual scripting is your thing unreal is probably your engine we've thoroughly tumbled unity's reputation to a pulp that's strangely similar to ea why would you pick unity over unreal again bullet point version unity is the renaissance engine you can do 2d as well in fact if it's another game type unity will be one of the first to support it the workflow for text-based scripting is better in unity it compiles faster it's c versus c plus plus it's just better in case you don't understand the compile time thing when you finish making a change to unreal scripts you have to wait anywhere from five seconds to two minutes based on your computer and how much you've scripted it doesn't sound like a big deal but when you're working on a game it could be a pain to have a minute long load time every time you make a five second change while fixing a bug not as big a deal if you're using blueprints because it compiles much faster so if you're going with visual scripting that can completely negate this whole bullet point another reason you might want to pick unity is their asset store because it is amazing there are some solutions on there that can save you months or even years of development time i can go on for days about some of the greatness inside the asset store so if you're going to drop money on third-party solutions anyway then unity is probably your engine final point unt's community is just larger and in the community world bigger is better you can find tutorials about almost anything so if your eyeballs are offended by one guy then no problem there are plenty of fish into youtube just search for what you want then boom a new more eyeball pleasing existence is upon your screen in the end there isn't a perfect choice if i had to break it down to a singular point i would say it's whether you plan to spend money on this or not unity just has a lot of good assets and anything that comes with unreal you can purchase for unity however if you felt yourself starting to get into a panic attack every time i've mentioned money then go with unreal it comes with so much out of the box and visual scripting is really good plus the templates that it has are excellent summing up i don't think you can go wrong with either choice even their weaknesses are still greater than other engine strengths if everything we've talked about so far has one too many dimensions in it for you then it's time to really talk about the best 2d game engines let's start by talking about the outlier the most specific game engine on this list rpg maker a quick disclaimer they're in the midst of releasing a new version so by the time you watch this rpg maker mv might be rpg maker mz instead but from my research that won't change anything i'm talking about now unless you're a detective this might surprise you but rpg maker is great for making rpgs however that comes with some caveats if you're not looking to make money with this if you just want to get your story out there if you don't mind that people will only be able to play it on the pc because you'll never be able to port it to a console then there is no engine that can take your vision and turn it into a full-blown game as easily as rpg maker now the guy that made to the moon could easily take a hosting dump all over my opinion of the engine's restrictions however i would still argue that if you look at the most complicated game that's been made with rpg maker and you look at hobby projects made with unity the hobby projects have things going on that rpg maker couldn't dream of trying to do something beyond an rpg with rpg makers like trying to turn a prius into a street racer theoretically possible sure but so is building a car from scratch don't get me wrong a prius has its place as does rpg maker and rpg maker's place is for the person that wants to release a story based rpg and doesn't really want to make money by making video games if you want to leave the money making door open to yourself in the future then rpg maker is probably not the engine for you game maker studio 2 godot and unity all give you a much better tool set to build a wide range of games with better yet the skills from any of those three somewhat translate to one another whereas the skills from rpg maker are often lost in translation so i recommend for those not doing rpgs to look between game maker studio 2 unity and good dough when choosing between them i found the crucial factor here to be the scope of your game is it small less complicated game medium size or you'll spend half a decade and not finishing it game maker studio 2 is great for small to medium sized projects again the guy that made hyper light drifter could take all of my opinions and build a toilet out of them however look through game maker studio 2's showcase and you'll see a certain scope of game and every time a game pushes against that scope you won't see them get much further heartbeast a guy who built his youtube channel with game maker tutorials decided to switch the godot once he started actually producing games that he was releasing well my favorite is actually godot i think because mainly because of the kinds of games that i want to make you'll find similar stories throughout youtube which brings us to godot probably the best 2d engine in terms of its ability to scale to different sized projects it's simple to start with free open source free has an interesting structure that helps to visualize code free picking up a ton of pace in the indie community free and good from small games to large games and i make tutorials for it and they're free however the trade-off for all its free open source glory is that it can't do the work for you with porting to councils the sdks that the council companies own are proprietary and therefore incompatible with open source but not incompatible with you doing it yourself going to consoles is an easier journey not easy but easier on both unity and game maker studio 2. you might not be able to handle that journey by yourself a good doe but if you just want to release to steam then you don't really have to care about this also a lot of people want to start on pcc how they do and use that money to port to consoles there are companies that specialize in porting godot games for medium to large projects unity does really well at this point unity has been a part of every discussion so it can feel like i'm favoring them but i'm not the reason they've been so intrusive in this video is the same reason that they've been king for all this time they are the swiss army knife of game engines there is no situation you can get in that they cannot macgyver their way through however you'll always wish you had your actual toolbox with you unreal good dough game maker studio 2 and rpg maker all do a much better job of feeling like specialized tools to professionally get the job done but you can use the asset store to make unity into an even more specialized tool that can make very very specific games but it can feel like you're piecing together a frankenstein solution it's an unstoppable monster when it works right but making it come alive is an achievement within itself now of course you can build unity or any of these other game engines into doing anything really but then again you could just build a game engine from scratch using just c plus plus and sdl or you could even break everything down and just use assembly the point here is you're using a game engine to save yourself time and maybe money if time is the main issue and money isn't really that big of a deal then unity becomes a pretty good bet you buy an asset to give you a good foundation to start with and then you just buy something when it will save you more time than you want to spend on a feature like procedural generation for instance if money is more important then unity shows its ugly side because it takes either more time or money with unity to get momentum going this is the reason why it's not very good for small games this is subjective but i found that game maker studio 2 and godot both have better workflows for 2d than unity meaning i feel like i can get more done in either of those engines than unity which is crazy because i have more experience with unity than both those other engines combined a developer named devduck on youtube had a similar experience switching from unity to godot in this video i'm going to try and take the six months of progress i've made in unity on my indie rpg and evaluate what it's like to build out those same features and systems in the godot engine and to be clear i'm not aiming for 100 feature parity or even close to that for the sake of being smart with my time and not totally derailing development of my game i'm limiting the duration of this experiment to about a week so with all that said where have i landed and what does the future look like for dauphin i will be continuing development of dauphin with the godot engine this is after six months of development basically i believe unity is the best engine if you're willing to spend money on it because so many great asset developers are out there that basically turn unity into different game making powerhouses however if you are not spending money in the asset store i think the best engine is between godot and game maker studio 2. game maker studio 2 if you're planning on doing a console release and it's not going to be a really large game hyper light drifter is about as big a game as you want to make in game maker studio 2 and that game really pushed the engine godot scales better is super free and i've understated how great of an engine it is as a side note if your video game making dreams involve the app store or google play then any of the engines can play a supporting role for you again i would like to point out how free godot is whereas game maker studio 2 costs money unity is also free up until you make a certain amount of money but they force a splash screen before your game basically saying made with unity which might as well be saying this game sucks because that's the reputation that splash screen gives your game if you buy into one of their premium subscriptions then you don't need to put that splash screen on your game but then you're not using the free version of unity anymore and the argument for godot becomes bigger and better let's go back to a bird's eye view over this topic when picking a game engine it's important to talk learning curves and transferable skills again rpg maker has probably the smallest learning curve on this list however it has the least transferable skills in other words using rpg maker won't help you much with learning other game engines every other engine that i've talked about will give you skills that translate much better to other engines talking about the other engines from easiest to hardest in my experience and in most popular opinions game maker studio 2 is the easiest godot unity unreal 2d is easier than 3d so if you're using unity to build a 2d game then it's probably easier than using unity to build a 3d game in fact it's probably easier to build a 2d game in unity than it is a 3d gaming godot there's just a lot of extra stuff to 3d that you don't need to use in 2d like lighting and iks you can use some of that stuff but you don't need to something that is quick and 2d like animation might take a while in 3d although the skills you gain from game maker studio 2 are transferable a lot of people have found that the switching from it to another engine is pretty difficult and again the engine costs money so it might not be a good investment up front if you're going to switch from it at a later point anyway therefore i think the sweet spot for engines to start with is godot it's free the skills transfer from it really well it's not that much more difficult than game maker studio 2 to get started with installs easy and scales well has everything you need built in except for an art program and with free art programs like libra sprite out there you don't need much more and that's really all you need to pick an engine literally if you're going 3d then pick between unreal and unity if you're going 2d then game maker studio 2 could do in unity and when you're first starting i recommend godot because of the balance of being free online game maker studio 2 and easier to start with than unity but if you're interested in both 2d and 3d then it's unity all day long and even unity especially if you're starting with 2d isn't that much more difficult than the dough either now for the most important part of this whole video the secret sauce choose a game engine seriously the secret sauce is just making a choice in the next 24 hours you do yourself such a huge paper by just picking one i said that everyone has ambition that the current them isn't capable of but is that true our parents all tell us that we can become anything that we have infinite potential that we are capable of any achievement and then we go through a childhood of life continuing to beat on us yell at us convincing us that our parents lied to us and after all of that we become parents and we tell our children the same thing we become movie directors and we tell stories about the same thing we become reporters and we scour the world finding proof of the same thing because deep down inside we all know that we are capable of more we all know we've been squandering our lives spending our time like a spoiled rich kid spends his parents money we all know that we have so much more potential that we absolutely have to pass that message on to anyone that will listen if only we could find some purpose some reason to warrant the sheer willpower to awaken that potential but we can't find it so we give up on one thing and another and another watching reading waiting for purpose so don't let your search for a game engine get intertwined in your search for purpose so many people get confused attempting to consume the answer they wish to find and they do get an answer it's just not the one for their question and nobody can give them the question because the blessing and curse of free will is that you get to create it all by yourself you want purpose so you want to create something you want to give it to the world but you don't know what so you ask others what should i make what engine should i use why am i alive and my answer to you is just pick an engine start creating today start small and create something better every day push yourself because in that striving in that creation i believe you'll create something inside of yourself as well different questions and different answers until one day all of those efforts will fuse together and you'll find yourself staring at your own masterpiece and you'll look inside of yourself and maybe perhaps you'll find the answer you've been looking for please like subscribe but most of all comment if you wish to give to this channel you can buy me a coffee using the link for my coffee account in the description but most of all thank you so much for your time i'm far more grateful to be a part of your search than i'm able to convey through time space and youtube i really wish for you to find everything you're looking for

Channel: Alvin Roe

Views: 259,612

Keywords: best game engine, best game engine 2020, best game engine for beginners, best game engine for beginners 2020, best game engine for indie developers, what game engine should i use, game engines for beginners, unity vs unreal engine 4, unreal engine, gms2 vs godot, godot, godot vs gamemaker studio 2, godot vs unity, unity vs godot, unity vs ue4, unity vs unreal, unreal vs unity, unreal vs unity 2020, game engine, game engines 2020, game engine 2020, game engines

Id: weqbHA77JkY

Length: 22min 48sec (1368 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020