Thoughts on game engines and tools out of making The BOSS

The day has been spent adding content to the game. Mostly by just shoveling in more stuff. Unity is behaving good, some crashes, but well.. not a big deal. Mostly the game is coming along and will be finished, so that is the most important thing and then I will have tried using Unity for making a game.

I have gotten a ton of ideas for how to better do things of course, so next game jam will hopefully be a better game as such (this one is more a walking simulator, even though the walking is very cool). And if I would use Unity again? Maybe. I see the benefits. It's absolutely a great tool to "predictably" making a game I think and throwing together a prototype is really easy. For an old code-head like me it is though not as enjoyable as the code-first approach of LibGDX or Dragon Ruby, although both of them would take a ton of more work to get something playable and good looking like this.

It's a little like wanting to draw a picture and starting with a white paper and drawing it from the ground up (Dragon Ruby). Whatever you do will be unique. It will feel unique since the code IS unique. Compare that to having a bunch of ready made templates to draw the picture (Unity and Godot). It will probably be faster to make the entire piece, the quality will look more polished but the end product will be very much a product of the templates and how they can be combined. The product will still be unique, but in a different way as the work put in will be more into working with the tools that draw the picture rather than drawing the picture itself. Nothing wrong with that. It's more the question of what you enjoy the most doing (and of course, this likeness is a big generalization).

I would use Unity any day if I had a project that I needed to get done at a certain time with a team of people. It's a very professional tool and the asset store is really awesome (no, I haven't tried Unreal that much yet. I will get to it but I would assume I will get the same sensation with it as I have with Godot and Unity). But if I am making a passion project? Then I am not as sure. That blank sheet of paper has a certain draw to it...