SmokeyReeve

Learning a new engine is something that I have wanted to do for years, however due to self imposed mental barriers never followed through with beyond installing Unreal or Godot, opening each once or twice, then returning to the familiar land that is Unity.

I guess my thought process in all this time centred around an idea of diminishing returns, that switching engine would result in a game that was no where near the best of my ability, all due to the fact I didn't have the years of practice with this new engine... I have never released anything for Unity other than a gamejam project so this thought process was flawed from the start, however it persisted.

That was of course until Unity had its big "masks off" moment, henseforth known as "the fuckening".

The Fuckening occurred in the midst of me preparing to return to working on my upcoming collaborative project, GORE. This was a Unity ran boomer shooter that myself and my friend Caleb Ralph have had in the works on and off since 2018. We were making some good progress with it before I had to take an extended leave from the project due to having a baby, and so returning to work on it was an exciting prospect. But that excitement was shattered by The Fuckening.

It's not to do with the money... Being realistic, GORE was never going to make $1million. But after a string of poor business decisions by Unity Technologies (each of which at the time prompted a meeting about potentially switching engine), the sudden jumpscare that was the news being revealed, the "double down" and "You're just confused" attitude by the company and the lack of information on how they plan on enforcing the install checks which are most likely some kind of forced DRM... We were rightly pissed off. We stuck with this engine for the last couple years despite the companies weird compulsion to ditch its developers and their actions kept getting worse. This was the last straw. And with that last straw meant the crumbling of our projects made using the engine, aka GORE.

So what next?

Well GORE didn't die. We didn't plan this for 5 years just to give up now. We just switched engine and started at square one again, as detailed here.

Honestly when writing that post we were under the impression that the engine change would completely bog down development of the game, however it hasn't! As a matter of fact development is now progressing quicker than it ever has before and that's all due to the fact that Unreal Engine 5 has so many quality of life features that should be standard!

Player Controller? That's up and running and with some tweaking will be even better than the one we spent way too long perfecting in Unity.

Decals? No more floating planes! We got actual decals!

Gamemodes? That's just a standard feature in unreal.

I'm baffled by this switch, the wall for so long was the difficulty and time it'd take to learn from square one all over again and yet the switch to Unreal Engine has instead felt like we've been freed! I'm excited for our future using Unreal Engine and now feel more motivated than ever before! GORE will come. It will be great. And many, many more games will come down the road!

Anyway, that's all I wanted to speak about... This is an off the cuff thing that I'm considering making a habit of, maybe in the form of YouTube videos (although with a baby around that might not happen). To any developers out there, give Unreal Engine a proper go. In the immortal words of Todd Howard, It just works!