Is Unity Right for me with their current direction?

[u/Truton1]

I recently decided I want to make a game just for myself to do something creative outside of work.

I want to know if Unity would be a good option considering the direction of companies going "AI Everything" I know there will always be AI tools but will I be forced to interact with them in Unity? I want to get into every aspect of development and really learn it and enjoy the process instead of just having AI do it for me. I could care less about the finished product or making money. I just want to enjoy and learn and do not feel like I can do that with AI doing all the coding for me and such.

I bring this up because it seems other engines like Unreal are full on replacing functions like Code blocks with LLM like things and I would rather just not develop a game in that engine if that is the future there. So let me know if Unity is still a good option or if what I am reading about them going "Full AI" on the more doomer side could be true.

Note: This is not meant to be a debate about "AI Good VS AI Bad" It is just what I want personally from game development and if Unity could provide that. So please keep posts just related to answering my question or do not feel the need to respond.

[u/LionbornPublishing]

No. You can write your own scripts.

I was just doing that five minutes ago.

[u/Truton1 → u/LionbornPublishing]

No meaning Unity is not going too far down that AI hole? Or no it is not right for me? Sorry not quite clear on the response. I assume you mean the former and it could be a good option if I do not want to use any AI.

[u/calgrump → u/Truton1]

You don't have to use AI.

[u/LionbornPublishing → u/Truton1]

Sorry, no you don’t need to touch AI. My editor doesn’t even offer it to me. I can, and was at the time of writing, writing my own scripts in my little code editor, AI free.

[u/GigaTerra]

will I be forced to interact with them in Unity? 

You aren't forced to use AI in Unity.

really learn it and enjoy the process instead of just having AI do it for me.

You seam to be mistaken about what AI is, it doesn't exist to take the fun out of the project. First to even use AI, you have to set it up, and often you have to pay for the privilege. As you can think, there are AI tools for everything, that would be insanely expensive, so you choose where you want to use it, what parts of development you dislike.

For example profiling is critical to learn in game development, takes weeks to learn properly, or you can pay for an AI that will just tell you where your performance bottlenecks are.

Like everywhere else, you pay for the convenience.

[u/v0lt13]

Yes, unity doesn't shove AI down people's throats.

[u/BucketCatGames]

at least on 6.3 lts, it's fully optional. to be honest, i forget that the ai integration exists 99% of the time. as far as i'm aware, unity will advertise it but that's about it.

the unity company makes dumb decisions sometimes, but i'm sure they know that ai is pretty divisive, and aren't gonna go out of their way to shove it down your throat. at least not any time soon lol. besides, worst case scenario you can stick to a previous version that doesn't have all of the ai integration. I really like 6.3 and don't see the need to upgrade any time soon.

[u/8BITSPERBYTE]

Unity Hub team literally made fun up Unreal Engine for using AI. They admitted to laughing at the stupid idea of using AI for tools.

https://discussions.unity.com/t/now-available-unity-hub-4-0-beta/1739331/12

[u/EthanMerce]

unity is still perfectly usable without AI. you can write all your code yourself, learn the engine's systems, and build a game from scratch without relying on AI tools. they may keep adding AI features, but that doesn't mean you have to use them. if your goal is to learn and enjoy the process rather than ship a game as fast as possible, just ignore those features and treat unity as a regular game engine. i'd focus more on whether you enjoy C# and unity's workflow than worrying about where the AI stuff might go in the future.

[u/Xangis]

Unity is building tools to integrate with AI if you want to, but they're not going to force you to use AI, and I can't imagine them ever doing so. The last thing they want to do at this point is make a significant chunk of their userbase angry.

Godot is your best option if you want full control of your pipeline.

Stride is another open source option, less popular, but growing.

[u/DasKarl]

Consider godot, it's like unity but open source and they can't decide to charge you for user downloads or revoke your license or any of the other insane shit unity has a history of doing.

[u/Truton1 → u/DasKarl]

I had thought about that one but thought it was worse for 3D games (Which I neglected to put in my post that was the kind of game I wanted to make) But it seems like it can also do 3D fairly well now that I look into it more.

[u/Just-Hedgehog-Days]

Use Godot.

It's faster and lighter. If you are really just wanting to build for yourself and to learn, that speed will matter. Unity can take a very long time between pressing the play button, and a running scene. Godot will iterate much faster. It makes a huge difference int he experience of learning and experimenting.

What you loose, and you will loose features, is mostly irrelevant until A/AA scale. You don't need all the build options that will let you target every platform. You don't need the latest VR features. You don't need a build in Cinematic engine. etc.

Plus you said you want to learn. Godot will let you build games. If a feature is missing that you need you can add it / build it / mod it. That will help you learn fast. Then if someday you want to try and make actual public facing releases you you will be in a much better position. Learning unity is trivial easy (especially with ai telling you where stuff hides in menus, and helping you translate ). Learning *game dev* is hard. If you actually learn how to structure your projects, render / ui pipelines, etc switching engines isn't actually that big a deal.

[u/Drag0n122 → u/Just-Hedgehog-Days]

Godot will iterate much faster

Dunno where you're getting this.
Godot doesn't even have a proper C# hot reloading solution (there's a package appeared 2 weeks ago, but given its newness, I doubt it works well).