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You might think devs would just jump ship from Unity to Unreal. But, IMHO, any self respecting dev that is using Unity is retarded in the first place, and is likely to struggle significantly using any other tool.
I mean, I'm no elite game developer. I've aspired. I've dabbled. I written shitty prototypes for games I've never finished in XNA, Unity, C with SDL2, C with GLUT, x86 assembly and 6502 assembly. Unity was by far the easiest, and the worst. If you are doing what it wants you to do, it's literally drag and drop. If you aren't doing what it wants you to do, the work explodes 1000 times, to not just write you own systems, but to stop the built in systems from fucking up your shit. At least that was my amateur experience with it. Unity is a skillset I'm not sure transfers to anywhere else.
But I donno, maybe someone with more experience can chime in. Like I said, unpublished amateur here.
Well, Monument Valley, Kerbal Space Program, Pokemon Go devs may be not self respecting but it seems going too far. Or not truly relevant.
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In the same boat as you. Former amateur game dev, mostly in the traditional roguelike genre. Unity is that perfect mix of "I can do 75% of what I want to do really quickly. But the last 25% is going to be wild."
At the risk of pissing off many other developers, it gives me Python vibes in that respect.
Some of the more successful games use parts of Unity then circumvent it for stuff like the actual game engine. Rimworld for example.
That was my experience working in Unity shops. Use gameobject/tick system at a very basic level but actual gameplay handled in custom code. It also provided a useable cross platform build/deploy pipeline in an era where people still cannot make basic business applications that work on both iOS and Android (or are just websites wrapped in a buggy browser app).
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ZorbaTHut has a bunch of great rants about Unity, but this one is usually what I link to, because I think the Tide has gotten a lot closer very quickly. GameMaker's a lot more attractive now for simple games doing exactly what the engine wants, and Godot's gotten much better just since he wrote that rant.
Note that he still recommends using Unity in some cases (at that time!).
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Good read! Speaking of Godot, they capitalized by announcing their new gofundme today. Good bit of PR.
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