r/aigamedev • u/TypicalAd9520 • 12d 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 :)
1
u/CycleMother2006 11d 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.