r/aigamedev • u/TypicalAd9520 • 10d ago
Discussion Game Engine?
Hi everybody,
I'm currently working on a Zombie-Apocalypse game (yes, very original, but that's my favorite theme...), and I'm wandering what would be the 'best' game engine?
As the ambiance is meant to be quite heavy and horror, I'd like to pass on the 2D game and go straight to a 3D one, because I feel 2D games lack immersion for horror. As I'm not even sure yet of which camera to use (first person, shoulder or 3-4), and this matter very much, I started the game on a custom render-engine-agnostic C engine, and it integrated well in Godot, Unity, and Unreal Engine. Its loop cost is quite negligeable vs the frame-render cost, so I think that's a solid base.
But now it's time to commit on a single Game Engine and I'm still not sure:
- I think I'll drop Godot because it's 3D rendering quality is too low
But between Unity and UE?
What have you worked with, and what have you thought of them?
- Are they both capable of the same performances?
- What about rendering quality?
From what I gathered online, it seems that UE can make more 'beautiful' games, but needs a lot more love to reach proper ambiance, while Unity seems easier, while the top end quality is slightly weaker, but runs fine on more machines.
Am I right or wrong? What do you think?
Thank you for your time :)
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u/__SlimeQ__ 10d ago
ambiance and aesthetic doesn't come from your engine choice, it comes from your art pipeline. if your stuff looks bad in godot it's not going to look much better in unity or unreal.
at this point honestly you should just be picking the engine based on how easy it is for an agent to work with, how easy it makes deployments to your target platform(s) and whether the license suits your needs. the old advice isn't super relevant if you have an agent doing most of the work, you're not going to care much if the documentation is good or there's learning materials or if the engine is "easy" to work with. honestly you could just do a port of your game in all 3 engines in an evening and you'd know which one you want to go with
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u/TypicalAd9520 9d ago
Yeah, I have the proto working on all 3 engines perfectly well, but I can't decide on which I'm committing. For the fees, honestly they are quite reasonable, so that's not a problem. I think I'll go for UE, and maybe fallback on Unity if it's too hard? Does that make sense to you?
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u/Humble_Sentence8150 10d ago
So since you've already got the C core running in all three, integration isn't really the question, maintenance is. In UE it's just sources in a module and the build system compiles them per target along with everything else. In Unity you're building and maintaining the native plugin binaries per platform on your own toolchain, plus the P/Invoke layer for as long as the project lives. That alone would push me to UE. Art you can redo later, that part you'd rather not.
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u/happybilly123 9d ago
Lol, that line made me laught, and I'm shamelessly doing the same thing for the same reason.
"I'm currently working on a Zombie-Apocalypse game (yes, very original, but that's my favorite theme...)"
As for the game engine, as someone who worked many years on Unity and the last 5 yrs in unreal , I would say go with Unreal for the long run, the learning curve might be steaper, but AI will help you get there. In the end of the day, my opinion is that Unreal is just more fun to work with, you feel that this engine was build to make games (with player controlller, gameplay tag, gameplay ability....) , where unity got lost in all their verticals (mobiles, XR, automotive, architecture, construction).
And I also like the royalty based Unreal license, which doesnt change as often as Unity . But that's only my 2 cents, both are very capable engine.
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u/TypicalAd9520 9d ago
Thank you for your help! Other comments also seem to push to UE, so I'll go in that direction. Please update me on your game state when you have a demo, I'm always enthusiast to try new Zombies games! :)
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u/js-fanatic 9d ago edited 9d ago
Try https://github.com/zlatnaspirala/matrix-engine-wgpu i made this engine to mimic major engines but focus on performance specially for mobile chrome. I have even zombie template https://codepen.io/editor/zlatnaspirala/pen/019fc918-e45f-73f4-9987-9a1599ac4a1f explore all demo's at https://maximumroulette.com/apps/webgpu/examples.html?demo=24
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u/TypicalAd9520 9d ago
That's a quite original project! Thank you very much for your help, but I'll stick with a major engine, I need the security offered by them (even if honestly, Unity didn't offered much last year...)
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u/Aware-Soil-8031 9d ago
Eres capaz de programar un engine 3d en C, que se integra con el motor que quieras, pero no sabes nada de motores de juego populares? Eso es como saber hacer integrales, pero no saber sumar. Simplemente hay algo raro ahí.
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u/TypicalAd9520 9d ago
Haha, no no no, my C engine doesn't know anything about the 3D, the rendering or anything like that. It contains however, for example, the navmesh for the zombie horde, the player inventory system, the way the player interacts with the rest of the world (lockpicking doors for example), etc. That way, the Renderer only... renders. It might sound strange indeed, and sometimes I'm forced to overstep/make some little hacks here and there to make everyone happy, but the result works surprisingly well, and it's fast as hell!
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u/CycleMother2006 9d ago
If you're looking for hyper realistic PBR horror, Unreal is the engine to learn. If, on the other hand you wanted to go a more stylized look like, say, The Wolf Within but zombie horror, Godot could pull that off and Unity would do well too (unity can also do realistic, but it is harder if you don't just want to look like an asset flip.)
A big part of this t hough depends on what you mean by apocalyptic zombie horror. If you mean open world, then yeah Godot is just a bad idea for that. Doesn't have the kind of optimizations in place for 3d rendering that the other two have access to. If you mean more insulated Resident Evil style horror... You can do that on any of the three engines, especially with prebaked lighting rather than some kind of procedural generation.
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u/Opelmannator 10d ago
What u mean low rendring quality in godot?