Unity VS Unreal Engine 4 | Which Engine Is Right For You?

choosing a game engine is a tough decision most articles on the subject will tend to give vague answers along the lines of oh you know well it depends on what you're making and what kind of game is it multiplayer what's your team like and yes while this is all true if you're just starting out this is an almost impossible question to answer you're pretty much forced to learn them all and then just feel in what's right for you well that's exactly what I did so in this video I'm gonna try to sum up what I learned what I found difficult what I found intuitive and you know hopefully if you're just starting out and you can't decide whether unity or unreal is right for you I think by the end of this video you'll have a pretty good idea of what engine is right for you unity versus Unreal is a hotly debated topic similar to the whole Apple versus Microsoft thing both engines are capable of producing triple-a quality graphics they come packed with extensive tool boxes such as terrain editor physics simulation advanced 3d rendering VR support you name it a while back you used to be able to see instantly which engine a game was made using each engine had its own look so to speak you could quickly see if it was unreal or unity but I mean that's just not the case anymore take this thumbnail of this video for example the character on the left was rendered using Unreal Engine and the one on the right was rendered in unity and they totally looked like they belong in the same scene there's literally no difference in quality so does that mean we have a tie well not quite let me explain it's a hotly debated topic which one has better graphics unity and real you know so okay let's let's just get this out of the way okay so here's the deal if you want to make a game that is a graphical masterpiece there is one solution for you and it is Unreal Engine ok unreal can handle higher particle accounts denser geometry more lights more shaders more complicated shaders is just the list goes on and on unity cannot beat the Unreal Engine in graphics out of a technical standpoint now but the important question is does this mean that you can't make a visually impressive game in unity of course not if there have been some gorgeous looking games made in unity and on the contrary there have been some pretty ugly games Unreal Engine as well like take pub G for example do you honestly think that that's a good looking game because I don't and that was made in Unreal Engine so just because you're using Unreal Engine doesn't automatically mean that your game is going to look better it just means that it has the capability and the possibility of looking slightly better than unity if you really crank the max out of the GPU but let's face it if you are an indie developer and you're just starting out you're most likely not going to do that now that being said when you open up the unity editor and you open up the Unreal editor everything just looks better and unreal by default you have to start tweaking and noodling in unity to get it looking like unreal unfortunately so that that's they're working on it unity is working on it but that has been the sad truth for a while and I think that also contributes to giving unity a bit of a eschewed reputation in terms of graphics but you can definitely get a really nice looking game in unity but it is going to be harder so just keep that in mind but look if you're making your first game graphics really shouldn't be the priority for you you really shouldn't care about that like it's more about the game how good it is in the gameplay and I mean the graphics don't worry about it like look at Minecraft for example you know do I need to say more alright so in terms of learning curve I started out learning unity first and I then moved over to Unreal Engine and I think that that was definitely the right decision for me unity is way more scaled back the interface is simple and easy to understand it's easy to follow Unreal Engine on the other hand is incredibly complicated it has just endless amounts of new windows that you can open up that has endless amounts of features and buttons and knobs and this and that and that and this and it's just completely packed with stuff that you can do which obviously is great but it is incredibly intimidating especially if you've never opened a 3d graphics application before if you haven't then unreal is going to blow your mind while unity is gonna feel a little bit more like Photoshop not really but you know it's that's sort of how I felt at least when I first opened them up that unity was definitely a lot less intimidating unity runs on c-sharp it was the first programming language that I learned there is there's a bit of you know difficulty in the beginning and learning and it's a bit confusing but I found it really easy to get up and running and starting to actually write some code from my own unreal on the other hand is running on C++ which I still is driving me insane I can do basic code and Unreal Engine for sure but I still find it to be incredibly frustrating to work with especially comparing to c-sharp this is not only due to the C++ being harder but also due to unreal stock you mentation the documentation for unreal is becoming very good especially when it comes to blueprints most engine features are covered and you can usually find all the answers you need in the documentation itself unfortunately this is not true for the C++ part the documentation is incredibly vague not giving you any real examples for you to work with just cryptic programmer language code I don't I'm not a programmer I don't speak programmer I don't understand so for me it's just kind of almost useless and many of Unreal C++ functions lack documentation entirely you'll find yourself having to dive into the source code and unravel how certain things work all on your own which is less than ideal when you're just starting out so combining the increased difficulty of using C++ with a severely lacking documentation makes coding in unreal very difficult and frustrating unity with their c-sharp on the other hand is easy to understand on its own and combined with a very thorough documentation with examples and suggestions of what to do makes learning to code in unity and absolute blast in comparison thankfully the documentation is not the only place where you can learn things both engines have a very solid community that is always there to help you when your need Unity's community is slightly larger because it has been popular among indie developers for a longer time but now with Unreal statist pricing structure of being free until you make money it has definitely picked up popularity among indie developers as well their community is growing and is definitely catching up to unity so you'll have a lot of options for YouTube videos and courses that you can buy online for pretty cheap and just a lot of people who you can ask you in the forums and both unity and unreal are very proactive at releasing new videos on their YouTube channels with learning content tutorials new features that usually go along with example projects so that you can open the games up yourself and have a look around which is incredibly helpful when you're learning if you're a little bit intimidating I would definitely say start with unity start slow and and you know then move over to unreal when you feel more comfortable now before I dive into talking about the different tools in unreal and unity I just want to talk briefly about the way the engines are structured and how you will be interacting and working with them and it this might not make a total sense to you right now but just hear me out so unity is a very bare-bones type of engine like you're pretty much just left with a program not really an any indication of what to do how to go about things you just you have your tools and your structure as your folders and you can make code and all that stuff and build levels but that's about it like after that you have to make the logic like okay you know who's your player gonna be who's the player controller how do we read the inputs to put into the controller where's the camera gonna be what what's the parent what's the camera parent to like all these things is it's you have to decide that stuff you make that up yourself and unreal it's slightly different they have a unreal is built with the expectation that you are going to make games that they expect you to make so for example if you're making a first-person shooter game Unreal Engine is gonna be your bread and butter because obviously it was designed in the first place to make Unreal Tournament now they're making for tonight with it Unreal Engine has everything built in to be compatible with making an FPS so you'll have character controls you'll have a weapon system you'll have damage systems you'll have aimed systems you have presets for throwing grenades and all this stuff is already there built in for you and that sounds great and it is however if you want to make a game that is slightly unconventional you might run into issues with that because you'll notice that unreal wants you to do things in a certain way and if you want to do them differently it gets a little trickier and if you are a master programmer or you're really really educated on unreal this is not gonna be a problem for you but I just want to put that out there that if you have a desire to just experiment this stuff and do weird things then unreal is gonna be a little bit tougher in terms of that however working with unreal is really teaching me different ways of structuring game mechanics and like you know levels and where to do things and how to where to put scripts and where to put functions and all this stuff because it is very suggestive of where things should be and and that's a great learning experience unity it's sort of like here you go do what you want okay so now we're gonna go into the tools of you know which really is what is the engine going to do for you what is it going to offer you this is where I find the biggest difference between Unreal and unity is simply put Unreal Engine has at all it just has all the tools you want it has a fantastic terrain editor has a super advanced animation system where you you know you have a ragdoll set up automatically everything is just working and as full volumetric fog like I can go on and on but basically what I'm saying is that if you want something or a function like there's gonna it's gonna be there and unreal now comparing this to unity unity is a great engine and fantastic games have been made using it but I gotta say there aren't that many tools in unity and the ones that are there or just they don't really work that well to be honest like they're there there's a terrain editor but it's incredibly limited I found myself having to reinvent a lot of tools to get them to work the way I wanted them to the guys over at Unity are working really hard at keeping up with unreal and are releasing new tools that improve the engine a lot but unfortunately I get the impression that these new features are a little hacked on and a bit of an afterthought unity is releasing new features on a regular basis but they usually take a very long time to actually make their way into the engine these new tools are usually offered as separate downloads and are stuck in beta for a very long time you encounter a lot of error messages and everything just feels a little clunky to me compare this to unreal which has all of its features neatly implemented into the engine everything is cohesive and nothing feels out of place it's all there and you rarely need to take any extra steps to access them both unity and unreal have an asset store where you can buy community created assets this is an incredibly good addition enough tastic way to bridge any gaps the native engine might have unrealistic place is not nearly as talked as unities an unreal store tends to be a little more expensive than unity so unity has the upper hand here unfortunately though I feel like unity is relying a little bit too much on their community to complete their engine for them and you will quickly notice that there are some pretty big gaps in unity when it comes to the toolbox and right now the primary solution is to buy third party assets from the asset store and they are usually not that cheap and while this could potentially be a great solution for you personally I get a little uncomfortable with the thought of having a bunch of third party tools running your game not only do you rely on support from the Unity team but you also rely on the support of these third-party developers to have your back in case something goes horribly wrong with your game and I don't know you have a very bare-bones program with very few features and those features aren't actually that great vs. and real which has tons of features and they all work pretty damn well I don't know I feel like unity is struggling with keeping up epic games are making a killing off for tonight and Fortinet is running on the Unreal Engine so any feature that they designed for fortnight we get as well so you can sort of see how they just I it's not really fair to unity because they just can't keep up with that and I understand that so you know but that is probably the explanation for why we're seeing so many delays with the unity and why unreal is really snap because they have like updates all the time with new tools new features and it's really cool but yeah to end this segment on a high note though a long missing feature and unity has finally been added I am of course talking about the shadow graph up until recently shaders have to be written by hand using a gel SL scripting language if you wanted to make your own shaders for unity we now have a full visual shader graph available which will be very familiar if you've used any 3d applications such as Maya or blender this is a huge update and puts unity miles closer to unreal as this feature unlocks so much potential and making your game look the way you want it to look but still the unity shader graph doesn't feel quite as tightly integrated with the core engine s with unreal it is only supported in specific render pipelines and if you don't set up your project correctly from the start it's a bit of a hassle to get it into your project unreal it's my Tyrael editor on the other hand feels very tightly integrated and will look very familiar to any of the other node based tools such as the visual scripting graph animation states etc but anyways that's sort of my experience with the tools in both engines that you know unreal is way harder to understand more complicated like [ __ ] everywhere but it's there at least and if you take the time to learn it it's it's really awesome to have everything in one place ok so now let's talk a little bit about code so this is usually the most commonly asked question when getting into the game they're like oh can I make a game without learning how to code I'm just gonna put it I'm just gonna know you can't oh but what about visual scripting ok you can do visual scripting however the visual scripting is still programming it's game logic it's like if you like visual scripting isn't actually that different from programming the only difference is that in programming you need to learn a few syntaxes and then you know understand a few things but it's really the same in visual scripting you need to know what the nodes are and what they do and how to put things together so to to attempt to make games without having any knowledge of programming is in my opinion a bad idea it you just will run into issues with it however it is possible and we'll talk about it and now let's talk about code if you have no prior experience in coding I cannot recommend that you start with unreal and you try to learn C++ I took Ben Tristan's course in unity which is amazing by the way I got a really good handle on c-sharp and then I went over to his Unreal course which teaches CPP or C++ and I still don't get it I it's it's so complicated and confusing and stupid that I don't know maybe I'm just an idiot could be but for me I just okay so I can actually do a bit of Basic C++ in unreal engine at this point and I feel fairly comfortable with it but I'm still like it's so much easier in unity and it's very frustrating so the thought of starting out with C++ and unreal without having learned c-sharp first it's just there's no way I would do it so if you don't have any experience I would just focus on getting a little bit of programming it's first because there's gonna help you so much and then you also have what unreal calls blueprints which is unreal built in visual scripting tools which allows you to build game logic without writing a single line of code and I've been playing around with it for quite a bit now and trying to learn and it's actually really cool but I do find that the experience I have in C++ and C sharp is really helping me understanding like I know what I want to do I just need to find the right nodes and connect them and I really like working this way because it's a very visual it's easy and to overlook things I find that with code it just kind of piles up and you just it gets confusing and yeah I'm that said I still I'm very glad I'd have that basic programming knowledge because it's helping me a lot so yeah that's that's that's the unreal which will basically allow you to do anything in blueprints and you could probably produce a full game just using blueprints not ever touching a single line of code however it is recommended on an reals website that certain things like heavy computations which are you know running every single frame that you shouldn't do them in blueprints because it is heavier you are taking a performance hit but not a major one so you'd probably be fine so this unit you have visual scripting who they don't however there is a tool in the marketplace as always which you can buy however they have really good reviews there's like it's called playmaker and there's also some one called bolt I actually tried bolt briefly it's very similar to unreal it's actually it's very very similar it's just a little slower but I found that if I had to work with that out that would be totally fine like it's definitely an answer to unreal sprint it's gonna cost you around $70 so it's a little expensive but if you're really intent on using the Unity and you want visual scripting then there's definitely options for you like take David Villa my friend who made he's not actually my friend but he made that fox game the first tree is called he made the entire game logic using only playmaker obviously it's an incredibly simple game but he still made a game and from what I hear he made a lot of money from it so you know it could be a good investment next let's talk a little bit about pricing that is actually something that many people ignore but I think it's really important to think about this unity will give you their engine for free given that you are not making more than $100,000 a year off any product created in unity so if you make less than $100,000 a year you don't need to pay them a dime and you can use the software as much as you want the moment you make more than $100,000 they want you to upgrade to their Plus program which is basically $40 a month and when you make more than $200,000 you have to pay $150 a month so I feel like that's a really fair deal to be honest and it allows people to experiment and try the engine without paying an upfront fee it's a very respectable business plan some people say it's too expensive but I don't think it is unreal on the other hand are a little bit more sneaky so they will also give you the engine for free but they will want 5% Commission off any game you make now that might sound fine there are there's a class to it actually so you can make $5,000 every quarter or something like that without having to pay the percentage but when you cross that do you have to pay them 5% of all your revenue and that's your revenue that's your gross so if you release a game on Steam and you sell it for $10 and then steam takes 30% that leaves you with about $7 like they're not gonna want 5% of $7 they wanted off the full price you're selling for so it's not what you get is what you're selling it for and if you think about that it's like okay well you know that sounds fair five percent that's not a lot that you know if steam takes 30 and what are they giving you it basically the joy of selling your game I think 30 percent from Steam that's a different topic but it's complete garbage okay so unreal this kind of charge you 5% and you may think okay that's not too bad but if you think about it five percent if you are aiming to make a living off making games like what do you want to make per year you want to make $100,000 a year all right am i right and all the way after there you pay nothing to unity but with unreal five percent of a hundred thousand is five thousand dollars you just paid five grand that year for a license and if you make two hundred thousand some game developers actually make quite a lot of money let's say make a million dollars oh all of a sudden it's getting a little bit more expensive so I think that it's worth considering this like if you're serious about making games and you want to make this a career you should really think about how much money that is actually going to cost you in the end one with unreal though is that if you release your game on the epic storm which actually only takes 12% of your game instead of 30 which Steam does the money you make off the epic store you don't have to pay those additional 5% like those 5% will be baked into your 12 percent commission so if you're planning on releasing on the epic store the whole engine fee is actually void it's just those 12 percent I think that that is actually a really fair deal 12 percent to sell your game and they're also giving you an engine I mean what steam giving you for their 30% nothing epic has gotten a lot of hate for their store and I don't really understand why because you're giving more money to the developers and you're giving them an engine to make their games worth I don't really understand what the big deal is maybe it's more for gamers though I'm not sure but I think it's a pretty good deal and that's what I'll be doing anyways I don't want to bore you with financial details but I thought I'd mention that because based on this information I actually decided to go with unity and then I started working in unity and I got so mad that I decided get I'm just gonna pay their stupid 5 percent fee and work with unreal I just feel like you need to be a very very strong programmer to actually finish a bigger game in unity I mean maybe not necessarily ok so there's I want to before I so for me I'm interested in making 3d games and I want them to look nice I'm very I really like a fire watch which was by the way made in unity but see here's the difference when they made fire watch they had a whole team like they had a team which was like dedicated to coding the you know making shaders from scratch and and you know creating all these features to make it look the way it did but you leave need a team of programmers do you see a team of programmers here because I don't so I find that for now Unreal Engine is actually really cool and they just bought quicks alright so now you have the entire mega scans library for free that you can put in your game at no additional charge which and they have like 10,000 assets up there so that's 10,000 assets you can put in your game saving you so much time and modeling that come on you just can't ignore that and there they keep innovating you get the quicks old mixer program which you can use the texture it's pretty basic but they're making you know progress with it I just find that you're getting so much for these 5% that I in the current climate I'm gonna say unreal is definitely my choice I will still keep an eye on unity though because unity does have a lot of promising features that they're announcing they keep coming out with these Lego we're gonna get better at multiplayer we're gonna get better graphics we're gonna have a better animation system and all this stuff we're gonna have visual scripting and maybe in the near future I will choose to maybe give unity another go I just find that for me right now I just didn't find unity to be usable it was the I spent way too much time just trying to make things work and I just I don't want to spend time that I want to learn how to make games I want to make cool games and that's what I want to do so right now unreal is making that possible of all unity is making it very difficult not impossible but difficult so now we're gonna move over and talk about you what is the best engine for you because sure I've been babbling on for quite a while now about why I thought that Unreal was the best engine from me but that might not necessarily be the case for you because I want to make one thing very clear here if you're making a 2-d game like a side scroller go with unity period you know if you don't want to code too much by playmaker or bolt whichever looks more interesting to you I think bolt was better it seemed better but anyways if you're making a 2-d game I would definitely go with unity first off the pricing structure obviously but second unity is actually a really good engine when it comes to 2d games because generally you'll have pretty simple systems in place there won't be a bunch of 3d and a bunch of rendering it's just gonna be simple graphics and unity actually has better 2d tools than unreal does unreal was never designed to be a 2-d game engine it it is there it's called paper 2d but I don't know I tried it a little bit and I didn't actually find it that intuitive and it felt actually kind of hacked on I definitely found that unity seemed to be more comfortable when working with 2d games they made hollow Knight and unity one of the best games I've ever played so clearly you know there's no and I think they they used playmaker they didn't do too much code they used playmaker for a lot of stuff so this definitely shows the power but when you go into 3d it gets a little bit more complicated so if you're looking to make a 3d game and especially if you have a design background using 3d applications I would probably say try out unreal and see how you feel you you'll feel very familiar it feels more like Maya or blender or 3ds max the one thing that's not easy to get into is the coding bit the C++ okay so if you're not in a design background but you are a programmer then you are probably going to light unity I hear a lot of programmers complain about Unreal Engine because of them there are specific hierarchies and their Voodoo macros and whatever but one thing that I do want to mention if you are an avid programmer that unreal you will have full source access to the engine with unity you don't but that being said I'm gonna give an overall advice to anyone getting started in game development if you're new and you just want to try it out and get into it do Benz unity course and learn a little bit of c-sharp especially if you have no prior knowledge of programming he teaches you so many things so you teaches you the basics of programming but also how to implement it in games and how to actually make games with the code and for me that was such a valuable lesson like it doesn't matter that it's unity honor or unreal but I really really urge you to actually take that course and learn a little bit of unity and then yeah you can try unreal and maybe do a course in unreal and see how you feel but I just if you have no experience I really recommend to start with unity even if you know that okay an unreal is my choice sure download it it's free can't hurt but if you get really discouraged because this is what happened to me the first game engine I downloaded was actually unreal and I just got like wow like it was just too much and then I found this course in unity and that is what really settled me in it's like oh okay hey maybe I can actually do this so I I can't say it enough start with unity start simple start with just like recreating simple games like flappy bird I really really recommend to start with unity and then move over to Unreal Engine if you're feeling like yeah I want to test it out I think that that's going to be the decision for most people because hear me out unreal is awesome it is so powerful but it is incredibly frustrating to learn it I just I I'm still frustrated sometimes because it is so complicated and there's just like stuff everywhere and then there's a submenu of a submenu of a submenu and it just never ends alright so it's definitely something that you learn it very slowly and it just like it might seem like you're not making a lot of progress but it just takes a lot of time to learn and there was really frustrating for me worse in unity I found that I was doing bench tutorials and we were just making games like that and I think that was really encouraging when I was just starting out and it just taught me the most basic principles and I highly recommend starting that way because I think it really is all about the fundamentals and and the fundamentals it doesn't matter if using unity or unreal it really doesn't matter yeah tip number one start in unity tip number two switch to unreal if you're feeling curious and test it out and and go from there if you have no experience at least give unity a month of your time or something like that just get used to it and then switch to unreal if if you really feel intent on it because if you want to get make a game like like dear Esther or Firewatch or like one of these walking simulators I would totally go with Unreal Engine you can do all of that stuff in blueprints no lines of codes needed because it's really simple and you're gonna get a way more pleasing result because you do have better graphics in Unreal Engine by default that's just the case so in that case I would definitely go with Unreal Engine for sure 2d games unity for sure if you make it like an FPS especially multiplayer multiplayer right now you have to do unreal because unities multiplayer features are really bad and it gets really laggy and it doesn't really work that well they're working on it they're working on this dot system which is supposed to improve multiplayer but again I don't know when they're gonna release that and nobody else knows either so is it gonna be one of these unity things where we just are stuck in beta forever I don't know but currently that's the climate if you want to make multiplayer and is pretty unbeatable so and we have fortnight to thank for that sir if you're one of those people who don't like fortnight well maybe now you have a reason to like it a little bit more I don't actually play fortnight okay well hopefully this video was helpful if you like this video I want to see more videos like this then I please help me out subscribe and leave a like that really helped me out a lot especially right now because yeah it's pretty MD I'm gonna keep making videos like this and I'm also gonna show some progress of my own games that I'm making so if you're interested in that then you know but anyways hopefully this video was helpful for you and now you have a clear idea of how to move forward and what to do and which engine might be right for you and yeah good luck I hope you make a million bucks

Channel: Pontypants

Views: 716,345

Keywords: Unity VS Unreal, Unreal Engine 4, Unity, Unity 3D, Unreal, Game Engine, GameDev, Game Development, Game Dev, Game Engine Comparison, Beginner, Guide, Comparison, Review, Game Engine Review, Blender, Indie Dev, Indie Game Development, Impression, 3D, Gaming, Which Game Engine, Video Games, How to make games, Game Engine Experience, Tutorial, In Depth, Analysis, Game Application

Id: M5FEsrbsb_M

Length: 29min 38sec (1778 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 11 2020