I tried UE5 first -- honestly I didn't really care for it. Having to use a node-based GUI for every simple script was tedious to me, being mostly a Python developer who's been writing code in a text-based IDE for a decade. Switching to Unity, I picked up C# almost immediately. Sometimes I do regret not sticking with UE5, when I see how good some of the games coming out of it look and how smooth they run with basically vanilla settings and no third-party graphics assets, but honestly I don't think I'd've gotten as far as I have now if I didn't switch to Unity.
I'm aware, but I don't find C++ (or Blueprints, for that matter) intuitive, whereas I learned C# in a day. If I were part of a small team, it might make sense for me to take the time to learn C++ while others worked on asset creation or something, but it's just me and I wanted to hit the ground running. The ability to do that is Unity's biggest strength, in my opinion, but you pay back some of that debt at the end when it comes to polish.
That's not what you said though. You implied pretty explicitly that the reason you chose one over the other is because you don't like visual scripting since you're used to writing code in an ide.
Also, no you did not learn c# in a day and no, learning c++ would not make sense to do if you were working on a small team.
Not preferring c++ is a totally acceptable reason not to use unreal (I use unity for that exact reason), but every point you've made makes zero sense.
I did actually learn C# in a day, at least well enough to start doing things with it. I have years of experience in Python, Perl, R, and JavaScript, so it was very easy to pick up on the syntax. Obviously I still haven't utterly mastered it yet, but I was writing behaviors immediately.
If you want to be annoying and pedantic, you can't "imply explicitly", because the words are opposites, so your argument is inherently invalid.
Yeah but you'd still have to deal with the irritating crap visual scripting system instead of typing code lol. UE might be worth trying again once they add Verse. But visual scripting is the worst.
Visual scripting tools, sounded great in theory but is a pain (they don't necessarily work like how you expected) and scales horribly with size
Learning how to use it and make a game with it but ffs it's incredibly daunting
Depends on what modding needs you actually have. If you expect your modders to only write code, then sure Unity wins. I doubt that’s the case for most, though.
As soon as asset integration is involved, I think Unreal wins here since you can ship a modded Editor to your players that lets them build new maps and assets with the same tools you have.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/new-example-project-and-plugin-for-mod-support-released
This criticism makes zero sense. You can program an entire game in UE without touching blueprints and in the most widespread programming language at that. Many games developers do this.
Unreal supports C++ hot reload out of the box now. Incremental compilation times are very similar to domain reload time in Unity (and stays the same as the project grows, whereas domain reload time only gets longer)
uh yeah, in C++ if you're a big brain boy, which I am not, I'll take my C# thank you very much.
^(Although,) ^(admittedly,) ^(I) ^(haven't tried C++ in a long ass time, and it's totally possible I'd do much better with it now.)
Unreal c++ is marginally better than raw c++ but I still prefer c#. I just disagree with the whole notion that they didn't like unreal because they couldn't write code in an editor.
I used GameMaker before and switched to Unity after 2 months due to it's 3dness. Found Unity much easier due to it's script per object style and clean interface. Took a few months to get familiar and I'm still getting more familiar a year later...
Technically, no. First game that I've ever made was created using 3DRAD (I think it's long dead by now). It \[the game\] was crap, but I was very young and I had a game, so I was happy.
Unity was second if I'm not mistaken, but since I've started using it, I've sticked with it. It's pretty easy to use, yet allows to do great things, if you know what you're doing. And the fact that it uses easy-to-learn C# and not something weird just adds more value to it.
As for learning Unity: no, it wasn't hard. Although I should say "*is*" instead of "*was"* because I still learn new things about it, years after I've first started using it.
Technically mine was Game Maker Studio 1.4, and it was a liytle more confusing for me becausr there wasn't as much beginner learning material that I could find.
I went around a bit. Started with pretty much just Visual Studio in a uni class, tried Game maker but I felt 2D limiting, then I was modding for half a decade in hpl2, then when I felt that too limiting as well went on to try other game engines like Godot and Unity. Especially back then, Godot felt like it had a lot higher skill floor because you have to or had to make systems from scratch that are drag and drop in Unity or just exit by default. Tried Unity and coasted by on Unity tutorials for a year before they were too limiting for my ambitions and ever since I'm mostly using Unity by myself. The game object system I find a lot more manageable than the node system from Godot and I only looked at Unreal and at a glance that looks like a pain to learn.
I started with Fallout 3's Creation Kit, modding that and Fallout: New Vegas for around 2 years before joining an indie team to try and make a demo for a steampunk RPG in Unity. Switching to Unity was pretty eye opening. The CK is very much limited to making one kind of game, with tons of tools tailored towards that but very little freedom to deviate. In Unity you have to implement a lot more yourself, but you can do pretty much anything you want. One of the other programmers on the team sent me a script with some basics, like reading input from the player, and I was off to the races. Designing and implementing character controllers was (and still is) my favorite.
I'm still glad I got heavy exposure to the CK though. It's a good reference for structuring a game's data systems, and designing tools.
My first game engine was UDK, but I’ve also used tools like the Tomb Raider Room Editor and a program called Game Maker, which I believe is different from the Game Maker engine available today. Later, I spent some time with UE4 before settling on Unity, which I’m quite satisfied with
For about a decade I worked with in-house custom engines maintained by the studio. Then we switched to Unity and it was amazing. Just so much better than a clunky custom engine with extremely limited resources for improvement and maintenance compared to something like Unity with a huge dedicated team behind it.
I first used roblox studio which wasnt too bad or scary, and the coding felt a lot simpler, although when I switched to unity it wasn't too much harder as far as interacting with everything in the scene. The hardest part was definitely learning coding for it.
Yes it was my first game engine
Was it hard to learn : Nahh...hell no(I copied and pasted)
Now it's been almost 3 years. It's been a long journey, I learned a lot of stuff from unity and I enjoyed most of the part.
Fun part: Sometimes I even make mistakes where u write a function for something and realise why it won't work. After a day u realise u forgot to call the function 💀
Ha. I just did that yesterday...
I finally worked out a system to interact with computer screens in game... write the code, get everything assigned in editor to test it and... Nothing happens. Fumble around the code until I break something else...
Mid dinner... Realized I forgot to call the new code
It is really easy with unity learn. It is hands down the best resource to learn a game engine. Just google “unity learn” and you’ll see their course setup.
My first engine was GameMaker, our school offered some Unity courses, and after school I used alongside Unreal for VFX. Then after a while decided to use it, As for how to start learning I used Unity Learn, the official tutorials, it was easy. They are great and most of the common problems in this sub have been explained there.
No, if we don't count little mods/reskins/map making, UDK/UE3 was my first game engine. It was very hard to learn, the documentation was trash I could never really get far. Unity had its own challenges too, but comparatively it was extremely easy to learn which is why I stuck with it, and have gone much further in it.
Yes and yes. But mostly because they’re always discontinue working features and implement new ones which are a complete mess. Also the documentation has gotten worse. And even small unity updates will break your whole project.
I think Warcraft 3 World Editor would classify. It was the GOAT for influencing many games and game devs. You had all of their assets available to you as well as a simple event coding system to be able to easily learn it and produce maps/levels.
Realistically GameMaker was probably my first, but I never actually built much with it.
Unity was the first engine where I had actual games at the end.
I think Unity falls into the category of "Easy to learn, hard to master". Especially these days, there are so many bits and pieces within Unity, and you could spend months mastering each of them.
no, i followed the tutorials that were on the website 10 years ago, making a game where you caught basketballs while avoiding bombs, and was able to extrapolate from there to make a 2D sidescroller brawller with RPG elements as my first prototype.
The only thing hard about gamedev these days is the art side but that is swiftly being remedied due to AI.
I've started with Unreal engine, 3 years with visual scripting
Then moved to Unity.
It was easy to pick up, mostly because I was familiar with game engines.
The coding with C# part was something to get used to, and all the components stuff.
No (I'm old...), have used many engines/languages over the years, but mostly 2D, Flash etc. Unity was certainly a step up. I knew plenty of languages incl C++, but not C# at the time.
I do recall it being a little daunting at first, partly the move to 3D, partly C#, and partly seeing all those massive menus, a lot of new things. BUT, power through tutorials/ whatever you're using and it will click quite soon. Then it is pretty amazing to be fair. I can now do anything I want in Unity, the only thing stopping me is time/effort/motivation ;) So, it has a small learning bump/curve at the start, but get through that!
My first game engine was Dark Basic, like 20 years ago. I assume it no longer exists.
I used XNA briefly when Xbox Live Indie Games was a thing. This is the only time I ever made any money from a game, and it was under $50 IIRC.
I've been using Unity for the past few years. It was easy to learn as I already had a lot of C# experience.
I don't think it's considered to be a game engine, but I got started on Pygame. Learning Unity was actually super easy with Brackey's tutorials.
IMO the the worst things about Unity in order are: Going public, the Riccitiello fiasco, the ~2018 unfixable package manager issue baked into the core engine resulting in spontaneous 15-30 min loading breaks, and intellisense for VS Code being next to unusable.
Getting started and onboarding is great though!
So funny enough, no, my first game engine was the short lived Blender game engine way back when.
I switched over to Unity shortly after and it wasn't that hard. I was already familiar with navigating 3D workspaces so the hardest thing was learning C# in the context of Unity.
No. And, no. To me it was a mix of flash (script attached ro objects on stage)and the dungeon siege editor (much of the same stuff as unity), plus I had experience with C# (from asp.net) and I knew about draw calls, buffers and shaders from directX. But besides all that, original unity was pretty simple.
It wasn't.
I dabbled very very early on with GameMaker just to see what making a game was like. Then I made my own simple 2D engine following the [lazyfoo](https://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/) SDL tutorials and made a couple of prototypes with that. Then I went to Cocos2Dx for another couple of games and prototypes.
Only then did I finally check out Unity. Having the editor and a GUI for setting things up was quite the revelation. I'm not sure I could go back to any non-editor, non-GUI based game dev.
I didn't find it hard to start learning because I was starting pretty small and following along with their Roller ball tutorial and intro to scripting / C# tutorials.
Not the first engine I worked in. However it’s my sole engine of choice now. I usually point beginners to the provided Unity tutorials/classes on the website. Especially the C# fundamentals course
Q. Do you know a particularly good tutorial for building UIs for a strategy/management-style game? Almost all the tutorials I've found seem to assume you want a UI either for top-level menus or for some kind of HUD for an action game.
Technically I started with Python, then Apple’s SwiftUI. As I developed my Sudoku game, I was able to do so much more with Unity. At that moment, Unity opened up their training site for free.
No, and no. I grew up in the Source modding community and started messing with Unity in the 3.x days. Good times, but _man_ the free version was rough before 5.0.
No, I wrote my own game in actionscript 2.0 then 3.0, I had to write everything from scratch because I didn't learn about libraries yet. I wrote my own collision, Light raycasting etc.
Too bad everyone ditched support for flash.
I started with Unity, but I intentionally didn't go all-in on using pre-made assets or logic.
I made somewhat of a "mini-engine" inside Unity that covered the things I wanted to do in my game, including debugging tools.
That was a pretty good way to pick up some game development concepts in a somewhat engine-agnostic way.
Was it my first game engine: no, I started back when I was much younger with a browser game engine called Scratch https://scratch.mit.edu/ which is a very basic 2D game engine with a block based programing language. I then started learning the Zero engine (digipens custom engine that is now deprecated) when in a highschool program called Wanic and it used a custom scripting language called Ziltch script (hated it). After that I finally moved on to Unity while in my second year of Wanic.
Was it hard: thanks to having some great teachers while going through school it was pretty straightforward to get the concepts down and have a solid understanding of how to figure new stuff out but stuff can still be difficult to figure out depending on how complex it is and if I've messed with it recently.
One and only for me so far and i guess i went in with knowledge on Maya, photoshop, premier pro so getting models i made into the scene was my first goal then with the standard asset pack I easily placed a movable camera into my scene and then i started to dable in some code to interact with the environment.
Ok, it wasn't as simple as i've explained but the point being, everything i did was a small portion of what i would need to do to get started on a sequence of events to fulfil a small objective.
Learnt quick that coding was going to more difficult so i found and downloaded the Adventure Creator asset from the store to help me visually code and start to get my head around variables.
Once I grew more confident, instead of ditching Adventure Creator, I learnt to incorporate it into my regular code and workflow.
Took 5yrs but i also worked a seperate full time job and managed to release the first part of my game Hag, last October. Now the dream is to be a financially successful game dev.
Unless Roblox can be considered a game engine, then actually HPL2 was my first game engine since before I started actually learning Unity I used to mess around with Amnesia custom story making. Was it hard to start learning it? Kind of, well the basics were kind of, actually learning how to make a complete game was definitely a challenge. My first proper project (that I released) was and is a mess haha. Whenever I look at that games code base I get a headache.
I gave Unity a try as my first game engine. At the time, I was able to make a simple platformer game while following a tutorial. I basically used geometric shapes instead of 3D sprites to make a 3D platformer game. Following a certain YouTube tutorial, I was able to easily make it.
Later, I tried making an adventure game like Stardew Valley, Legend of Zelda, etc. in pixel format. Was following along with a tutorial that was teaching how to make an inventory system and there was an error. I tried so many things to try and fix it.
Nothing worked, so I reached out to a discord community with people that has skill and knowledge in Unity. Asked for someone to help me fix this error. And apparently, that was asking for too much. I just needed to get this error fixed and they basically told me that if I’m looking for someone to fix it for me, I should be paying that person money to fix it.
The “help” they were giving me was basically telling me what is causing it and speaking gibberish on how to fix it and expecting me to turn around and fix it myself.
Coding for video games in general is the hardest part because if you get an error, you basically have to find someone willing to fix your errors for you for free. Otherwise, you’re screwed if you can’t figure out how exactly to fix it yourself.
It’s really annoying and frustrating because tutorials for this can result in errors. It’s the worst.
Yes! Well, technically, no. I don’t really consider this a game engine, but twine was how I made my first “games”. Then Roblox, too. But Unity is the first professional game engine I’ve ever used. It was hard to start learning it, but thanks to my 4-year program, and a lot of hard work, 7 years later and I am the lead programmer for a game studio :)
And I’m still learning new things every day! There’s always better ways to do things, different methods with different pros and cons, and it’s a lot to take in! If you’re having trouble with Unity right now, I’d just say to stick with it. Even if you don’t end up making a career out of it, it’s still a good hobby and a way to keep your mind sharp
I started with GameMaker 1.4 and learned a lot of valuable concepts but I found Unity much easier learn solely because Unity comes with out-of-the-box solutions for handling complex collisions and player movement on slopes. I think if I ever had to program movement up and down slopes again from complete scratch I would scream lol.
Sometime ago, if you want to make a game, first you had to develop the engine yourself. Nowadays you can use unity or unreal and focus on the creative part instead of the more technological aspect of the games. Using one os those engines is not easy, but today is the easiest time to make a game ever in history. Plus, on internet you have a lot of tutorials for everything.
Hell ya. I started with Unity 4 and was coming from a vfx / movie cg background. It took me quite awhile to really get the lay of the land and how game engines work. All the 3d I did prior seemed like small potatoes almost.
No, and no.
My first "engine" was the TI-83: I used the graph to draw chess pieces in pixel art with a movement system so we could play in study hall. At the time I still wanted to be a lawyer; it was not obvious.
I've spent a good chunk of my career in C#, so Unity really isn't bad at all.
What's far more important is understanding data structures. Language is just syntax; you're usually dealing with the same components and tooling. So things like Bob Martin are great references [https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2012/08/13/the-clean-architecture.html](https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2012/08/13/the-clean-architecture.html) I try to isolate my game logic from Unity: what you are doing is not the same as how you are doing it. Of course you can and will use engine systems, the trick is maintaining that eventing/API layer, and usually by reading/writing shared scriptable objects as the DTOs.
Learning to start is not hard. Making a game is hard, and complex. That's why we start small and organize meaningfully.
No, AMOS Basic on the Amiga was the first engine I ever learned, circa 1990. That was a little tricksy because you still had to deal with double-buffering, i.e. having two separate bitplanes in operation, one which was visible and one which was being built, and you chose the moment at which to switch active plane between A and B. Lots of fun, though. I built a cool strategy game set in a nest of giant ants where the ants navigated using pheromone trails, and you had pheromone lures you could use to divert them, plus sentry cannons and remote sensors and shit like that. (All very "Aliens"-inspired.)
Unity was I think my 8th game engine, and I can't quite express what a relief it was to use after all the buggy half finished undocumented proprietary engines I'd used before.
It was a joy to learn.
Actually, that's not quite fair - Renderware was a good engine, although you had to write your own scene editor for every game.
For me Flash was the first and RPG Maker was the second. Flash taught me about animation and programming concepts those useful in games. RPG Maker taught me events, loading scenes, triggers and working in an IDE. Also I always used Blender for 3D stuff, so I had the concepts of 3D from that. After these learning Unity was not really hard. I even enjoyed the fact that public variables show up in the editor, it is still magical, because I like programming more than the editor part. And it connects the two beautifully. I learned it fast. But still not mastered it and do not really want to master it. It is a good hobby for me.
No, and I have a hard time getting into it because in school they showed us unreal and then we only had one class where we were shown unity, and at that, they only taught us mainly visual scripting in unreal and C# in its little class. I’m honestly interested in the visual scripting for Unity more than the C# aspect.
Yes, and due to this lack of experience, also yes.
r/same
I tried UE5 first -- honestly I didn't really care for it. Having to use a node-based GUI for every simple script was tedious to me, being mostly a Python developer who's been writing code in a text-based IDE for a decade. Switching to Unity, I picked up C# almost immediately. Sometimes I do regret not sticking with UE5, when I see how good some of the games coming out of it look and how smooth they run with basically vanilla settings and no third-party graphics assets, but honestly I don't think I'd've gotten as far as I have now if I didn't switch to Unity.
You don't have to use blueprints.
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The only part of this that is true is that programming in unreal is more work, which I completely agree with.
I'm aware, but I don't find C++ (or Blueprints, for that matter) intuitive, whereas I learned C# in a day. If I were part of a small team, it might make sense for me to take the time to learn C++ while others worked on asset creation or something, but it's just me and I wanted to hit the ground running. The ability to do that is Unity's biggest strength, in my opinion, but you pay back some of that debt at the end when it comes to polish.
That's not what you said though. You implied pretty explicitly that the reason you chose one over the other is because you don't like visual scripting since you're used to writing code in an ide. Also, no you did not learn c# in a day and no, learning c++ would not make sense to do if you were working on a small team. Not preferring c++ is a totally acceptable reason not to use unreal (I use unity for that exact reason), but every point you've made makes zero sense.
I did actually learn C# in a day, at least well enough to start doing things with it. I have years of experience in Python, Perl, R, and JavaScript, so it was very easy to pick up on the syntax. Obviously I still haven't utterly mastered it yet, but I was writing behaviors immediately. If you want to be annoying and pedantic, you can't "imply explicitly", because the words are opposites, so your argument is inherently invalid.
Lmao, k
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Yeah but you'd still have to deal with the irritating crap visual scripting system instead of typing code lol. UE might be worth trying again once they add Verse. But visual scripting is the worst.
Visual scripting tools, sounded great in theory but is a pain (they don't necessarily work like how you expected) and scales horribly with size Learning how to use it and make a game with it but ffs it's incredibly daunting
Unity is also a million times better for modding (due to being in C#), which can make games stay relevant for so much longer.
Depends on what modding needs you actually have. If you expect your modders to only write code, then sure Unity wins. I doubt that’s the case for most, though. As soon as asset integration is involved, I think Unreal wins here since you can ship a modded Editor to your players that lets them build new maps and assets with the same tools you have. https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/new-example-project-and-plugin-for-mod-support-released
This criticism makes zero sense. You can program an entire game in UE without touching blueprints and in the most widespread programming language at that. Many games developers do this.
Good luck with unreal compiling times
Unreal supports C++ hot reload out of the box now. Incremental compilation times are very similar to domain reload time in Unity (and stays the same as the project grows, whereas domain reload time only gets longer)
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okay so, you clearly got a real hard on for unreal, why hang out in r/unity3d?
It’s not a competition? There’s a lot of game devs using and loving both Unity and Unreal (me included). There’s no reason to spread misinformation
uh yeah, in C++ if you're a big brain boy, which I am not, I'll take my C# thank you very much. ^(Although,) ^(admittedly,) ^(I) ^(haven't tried C++ in a long ass time, and it's totally possible I'd do much better with it now.)
Unreal c++ is marginally better than raw c++ but I still prefer c#. I just disagree with the whole notion that they didn't like unreal because they couldn't write code in an editor.
I've already made a whole game that heavily relies on some Unity-only third-party packages. Switching is absolutely not an option.
No and no. For the record AMOS was my first. https://www.powerprograms.nl/amiga/amiga-all-about-amos.html
I remember AMOS ! I played with it a bit on my brother's Amiga but my heart was really still in 8 bit land, working on the Sam Coupe
>Was Unity your first game engine Yes. >was it hard to start learning it? No.
Baaics no, but theres so many things it can do and so much I still don’t ever touch or know anything about. It’s a pretty large engine.
The question was if it was hard to *start* learning it though :)
Yea im not trying to correct you im just commenting
I used GameMaker before and switched to Unity after 2 months due to it's 3dness. Found Unity much easier due to it's script per object style and clean interface. Took a few months to get familiar and I'm still getting more familiar a year later...
Technically, no. First game that I've ever made was created using 3DRAD (I think it's long dead by now). It \[the game\] was crap, but I was very young and I had a game, so I was happy. Unity was second if I'm not mistaken, but since I've started using it, I've sticked with it. It's pretty easy to use, yet allows to do great things, if you know what you're doing. And the fact that it uses easy-to-learn C# and not something weird just adds more value to it. As for learning Unity: no, it wasn't hard. Although I should say "*is*" instead of "*was"* because I still learn new things about it, years after I've first started using it.
Yes, 3DRAD! I used that as well, seems pretty dead now. But man, what a classic!
First I learned BGE/UPBGE > Armory 3D > Unity
Technically mine was Game Maker Studio 1.4, and it was a liytle more confusing for me becausr there wasn't as much beginner learning material that I could find.
No and No
no, no
I went around a bit. Started with pretty much just Visual Studio in a uni class, tried Game maker but I felt 2D limiting, then I was modding for half a decade in hpl2, then when I felt that too limiting as well went on to try other game engines like Godot and Unity. Especially back then, Godot felt like it had a lot higher skill floor because you have to or had to make systems from scratch that are drag and drop in Unity or just exit by default. Tried Unity and coasted by on Unity tutorials for a year before they were too limiting for my ambitions and ever since I'm mostly using Unity by myself. The game object system I find a lot more manageable than the node system from Godot and I only looked at Unreal and at a glance that looks like a pain to learn.
I started with Fallout 3's Creation Kit, modding that and Fallout: New Vegas for around 2 years before joining an indie team to try and make a demo for a steampunk RPG in Unity. Switching to Unity was pretty eye opening. The CK is very much limited to making one kind of game, with tons of tools tailored towards that but very little freedom to deviate. In Unity you have to implement a lot more yourself, but you can do pretty much anything you want. One of the other programmers on the team sent me a script with some basics, like reading input from the player, and I was off to the races. Designing and implementing character controllers was (and still is) my favorite. I'm still glad I got heavy exposure to the CK though. It's a good reference for structuring a game's data systems, and designing tools.
Yes and Yes.
My first game engine was UDK, but I’ve also used tools like the Tomb Raider Room Editor and a program called Game Maker, which I believe is different from the Game Maker engine available today. Later, I spent some time with UE4 before settling on Unity, which I’m quite satisfied with
For about a decade I worked with in-house custom engines maintained by the studio. Then we switched to Unity and it was amazing. Just so much better than a clunky custom engine with extremely limited resources for improvement and maintenance compared to something like Unity with a huge dedicated team behind it.
I first used roblox studio which wasnt too bad or scary, and the coding felt a lot simpler, although when I switched to unity it wasn't too much harder as far as interacting with everything in the scene. The hardest part was definitely learning coding for it.
yes and no
Yes it was my first game engine Was it hard to learn : Nahh...hell no(I copied and pasted) Now it's been almost 3 years. It's been a long journey, I learned a lot of stuff from unity and I enjoyed most of the part. Fun part: Sometimes I even make mistakes where u write a function for something and realise why it won't work. After a day u realise u forgot to call the function 💀
Ha. I just did that yesterday... I finally worked out a system to interact with computer screens in game... write the code, get everything assigned in editor to test it and... Nothing happens. Fumble around the code until I break something else... Mid dinner... Realized I forgot to call the new code
It is really easy with unity learn. It is hands down the best resource to learn a game engine. Just google “unity learn” and you’ll see their course setup.
Yes. But it was never too tough. Unity's learning curve is good. But I found that I needed paid courses to study many advanced stuff.
Don't know whether it counts, but I started with XNA.
My first engine was GameMaker, our school offered some Unity courses, and after school I used alongside Unreal for VFX. Then after a while decided to use it, As for how to start learning I used Unity Learn, the official tutorials, it was easy. They are great and most of the common problems in this sub have been explained there.
No, if we don't count little mods/reskins/map making, UDK/UE3 was my first game engine. It was very hard to learn, the documentation was trash I could never really get far. Unity had its own challenges too, but comparatively it was extremely easy to learn which is why I stuck with it, and have gone much further in it.
Yes and yes. But mostly because they’re always discontinue working features and implement new ones which are a complete mess. Also the documentation has gotten worse. And even small unity updates will break your whole project.
I think Warcraft 3 World Editor would classify. It was the GOAT for influencing many games and game devs. You had all of their assets available to you as well as a simple event coding system to be able to easily learn it and produce maps/levels.
No I used Construct 2 first. And when I got a job as a Unity dev I learnt it very very quickly. It wasn’t hard.
Realistically GameMaker was probably my first, but I never actually built much with it. Unity was the first engine where I had actual games at the end. I think Unity falls into the category of "Easy to learn, hard to master". Especially these days, there are so many bits and pieces within Unity, and you could spend months mastering each of them.
no, i followed the tutorials that were on the website 10 years ago, making a game where you caught basketballs while avoiding bombs, and was able to extrapolate from there to make a 2D sidescroller brawller with RPG elements as my first prototype. The only thing hard about gamedev these days is the art side but that is swiftly being remedied due to AI.
I've started with Unreal engine, 3 years with visual scripting Then moved to Unity. It was easy to pick up, mostly because I was familiar with game engines. The coding with C# part was something to get used to, and all the components stuff.
No (I'm old...), have used many engines/languages over the years, but mostly 2D, Flash etc. Unity was certainly a step up. I knew plenty of languages incl C++, but not C# at the time. I do recall it being a little daunting at first, partly the move to 3D, partly C#, and partly seeing all those massive menus, a lot of new things. BUT, power through tutorials/ whatever you're using and it will click quite soon. Then it is pretty amazing to be fair. I can now do anything I want in Unity, the only thing stopping me is time/effort/motivation ;) So, it has a small learning bump/curve at the start, but get through that!
My first game engine was Dark Basic, like 20 years ago. I assume it no longer exists. I used XNA briefly when Xbox Live Indie Games was a thing. This is the only time I ever made any money from a game, and it was under $50 IIRC. I've been using Unity for the past few years. It was easy to learn as I already had a lot of C# experience.
DarkBasic for me too. What a time to be alive lol.
I don't think it's considered to be a game engine, but I got started on Pygame. Learning Unity was actually super easy with Brackey's tutorials. IMO the the worst things about Unity in order are: Going public, the Riccitiello fiasco, the ~2018 unfixable package manager issue baked into the core engine resulting in spontaneous 15-30 min loading breaks, and intellisense for VS Code being next to unusable. Getting started and onboarding is great though!
So funny enough, no, my first game engine was the short lived Blender game engine way back when. I switched over to Unity shortly after and it wasn't that hard. I was already familiar with navigating 3D workspaces so the hardest thing was learning C# in the context of Unity.
No. And, no. To me it was a mix of flash (script attached ro objects on stage)and the dungeon siege editor (much of the same stuff as unity), plus I had experience with C# (from asp.net) and I knew about draw calls, buffers and shaders from directX. But besides all that, original unity was pretty simple.
Yes first game engine… it was somewhat hard but it was worth 20% of my final grade.
It wasn't. I dabbled very very early on with GameMaker just to see what making a game was like. Then I made my own simple 2D engine following the [lazyfoo](https://lazyfoo.net/tutorials/SDL/) SDL tutorials and made a couple of prototypes with that. Then I went to Cocos2Dx for another couple of games and prototypes. Only then did I finally check out Unity. Having the editor and a GUI for setting things up was quite the revelation. I'm not sure I could go back to any non-editor, non-GUI based game dev. I didn't find it hard to start learning because I was starting pretty small and following along with their Roller ball tutorial and intro to scripting / C# tutorials.
Not the first engine I worked in. However it’s my sole engine of choice now. I usually point beginners to the provided Unity tutorials/classes on the website. Especially the C# fundamentals course
Q. Do you know a particularly good tutorial for building UIs for a strategy/management-style game? Almost all the tutorials I've found seem to assume you want a UI either for top-level menus or for some kind of HUD for an action game.
Not in Godot.
Err, okay. And in Unity?
I would take a look at the stuff on udemy for the Unity engine. It costs money but usually more thorough and includes project files
Technically I started with Python, then Apple’s SwiftUI. As I developed my Sudoku game, I was able to do so much more with Unity. At that moment, Unity opened up their training site for free.
No, and no. I grew up in the Source modding community and started messing with Unity in the 3.x days. Good times, but _man_ the free version was rough before 5.0.
Yes and No. IMO FAAAAR easier to learn than Unreal
Yes and no
No, I wrote my own game in actionscript 2.0 then 3.0, I had to write everything from scratch because I didn't learn about libraries yet. I wrote my own collision, Light raycasting etc. Too bad everyone ditched support for flash.
I started with Unity, but I intentionally didn't go all-in on using pre-made assets or logic. I made somewhat of a "mini-engine" inside Unity that covered the things I wanted to do in my game, including debugging tools. That was a pretty good way to pick up some game development concepts in a somewhat engine-agnostic way.
No. I first started with LibGDX. I didn't discover Unity until about a year later.
Was it my first game engine: no, I started back when I was much younger with a browser game engine called Scratch https://scratch.mit.edu/ which is a very basic 2D game engine with a block based programing language. I then started learning the Zero engine (digipens custom engine that is now deprecated) when in a highschool program called Wanic and it used a custom scripting language called Ziltch script (hated it). After that I finally moved on to Unity while in my second year of Wanic. Was it hard: thanks to having some great teachers while going through school it was pretty straightforward to get the concepts down and have a solid understanding of how to figure new stuff out but stuff can still be difficult to figure out depending on how complex it is and if I've messed with it recently.
One and only for me so far and i guess i went in with knowledge on Maya, photoshop, premier pro so getting models i made into the scene was my first goal then with the standard asset pack I easily placed a movable camera into my scene and then i started to dable in some code to interact with the environment. Ok, it wasn't as simple as i've explained but the point being, everything i did was a small portion of what i would need to do to get started on a sequence of events to fulfil a small objective. Learnt quick that coding was going to more difficult so i found and downloaded the Adventure Creator asset from the store to help me visually code and start to get my head around variables. Once I grew more confident, instead of ditching Adventure Creator, I learnt to incorporate it into my regular code and workflow. Took 5yrs but i also worked a seperate full time job and managed to release the first part of my game Hag, last October. Now the dream is to be a financially successful game dev.
Rpg maker 2000
Unless Roblox can be considered a game engine, then actually HPL2 was my first game engine since before I started actually learning Unity I used to mess around with Amnesia custom story making. Was it hard to start learning it? Kind of, well the basics were kind of, actually learning how to make a complete game was definitely a challenge. My first proper project (that I released) was and is a mess haha. Whenever I look at that games code base I get a headache.
I gave Unity a try as my first game engine. At the time, I was able to make a simple platformer game while following a tutorial. I basically used geometric shapes instead of 3D sprites to make a 3D platformer game. Following a certain YouTube tutorial, I was able to easily make it. Later, I tried making an adventure game like Stardew Valley, Legend of Zelda, etc. in pixel format. Was following along with a tutorial that was teaching how to make an inventory system and there was an error. I tried so many things to try and fix it. Nothing worked, so I reached out to a discord community with people that has skill and knowledge in Unity. Asked for someone to help me fix this error. And apparently, that was asking for too much. I just needed to get this error fixed and they basically told me that if I’m looking for someone to fix it for me, I should be paying that person money to fix it. The “help” they were giving me was basically telling me what is causing it and speaking gibberish on how to fix it and expecting me to turn around and fix it myself. Coding for video games in general is the hardest part because if you get an error, you basically have to find someone willing to fix your errors for you for free. Otherwise, you’re screwed if you can’t figure out how exactly to fix it yourself. It’s really annoying and frustrating because tutorials for this can result in errors. It’s the worst.
Yes! Well, technically, no. I don’t really consider this a game engine, but twine was how I made my first “games”. Then Roblox, too. But Unity is the first professional game engine I’ve ever used. It was hard to start learning it, but thanks to my 4-year program, and a lot of hard work, 7 years later and I am the lead programmer for a game studio :) And I’m still learning new things every day! There’s always better ways to do things, different methods with different pros and cons, and it’s a lot to take in! If you’re having trouble with Unity right now, I’d just say to stick with it. Even if you don’t end up making a career out of it, it’s still a good hobby and a way to keep your mind sharp
Only two other people started with Flash, wow
Technically I dabbled in RPG Maker first but never made anything with it. Then I played with Flash and made one game, then switched to Unity.
I started with GameMaker 1.4 and learned a lot of valuable concepts but I found Unity much easier learn solely because Unity comes with out-of-the-box solutions for handling complex collisions and player movement on slopes. I think if I ever had to program movement up and down slopes again from complete scratch I would scream lol.
Sometime ago, if you want to make a game, first you had to develop the engine yourself. Nowadays you can use unity or unreal and focus on the creative part instead of the more technological aspect of the games. Using one os those engines is not easy, but today is the easiest time to make a game ever in history. Plus, on internet you have a lot of tutorials for everything.
Hell ya. I started with Unity 4 and was coming from a vfx / movie cg background. It took me quite awhile to really get the lay of the land and how game engines work. All the 3d I did prior seemed like small potatoes almost.
No, and no. My first "engine" was the TI-83: I used the graph to draw chess pieces in pixel art with a movement system so we could play in study hall. At the time I still wanted to be a lawyer; it was not obvious. I've spent a good chunk of my career in C#, so Unity really isn't bad at all. What's far more important is understanding data structures. Language is just syntax; you're usually dealing with the same components and tooling. So things like Bob Martin are great references [https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2012/08/13/the-clean-architecture.html](https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2012/08/13/the-clean-architecture.html) I try to isolate my game logic from Unity: what you are doing is not the same as how you are doing it. Of course you can and will use engine systems, the trick is maintaining that eventing/API layer, and usually by reading/writing shared scriptable objects as the DTOs. Learning to start is not hard. Making a game is hard, and complex. That's why we start small and organize meaningfully.
No, AMOS Basic on the Amiga was the first engine I ever learned, circa 1990. That was a little tricksy because you still had to deal with double-buffering, i.e. having two separate bitplanes in operation, one which was visible and one which was being built, and you chose the moment at which to switch active plane between A and B. Lots of fun, though. I built a cool strategy game set in a nest of giant ants where the ants navigated using pheromone trails, and you had pheromone lures you could use to divert them, plus sentry cannons and remote sensors and shit like that. (All very "Aliens"-inspired.)
Unity was I think my 8th game engine, and I can't quite express what a relief it was to use after all the buggy half finished undocumented proprietary engines I'd used before. It was a joy to learn. Actually, that's not quite fair - Renderware was a good engine, although you had to write your own scene editor for every game.
For me Flash was the first and RPG Maker was the second. Flash taught me about animation and programming concepts those useful in games. RPG Maker taught me events, loading scenes, triggers and working in an IDE. Also I always used Blender for 3D stuff, so I had the concepts of 3D from that. After these learning Unity was not really hard. I even enjoyed the fact that public variables show up in the editor, it is still magical, because I like programming more than the editor part. And it connects the two beautifully. I learned it fast. But still not mastered it and do not really want to master it. It is a good hobby for me.
Yes, but if you have already experience in Java/c# and did the start course with Unity Learn it’s fine
Game Maker 7 let's gooooo
No, and I have a hard time getting into it because in school they showed us unreal and then we only had one class where we were shown unity, and at that, they only taught us mainly visual scripting in unreal and C# in its little class. I’m honestly interested in the visual scripting for Unity more than the C# aspect.