help a fellow indie dev out and wishlist my game on steam! store.steampowered.com/app/2862470/BUMBI/

And here I am, sitting and writing my own engine in C++ instead of writing actual games...

Me after I've already chosen an engine and actively working on my game: _Interesting_

"Don't expect to be making an open-world MMORPG in your first week while never having opened an engine before" I didn't think I was going to be called out so directly, damn

crying and throwing up when rpg maker gets left out

I'm currently in love with Godot. I'm using Unreal for my game design class, but it's overwhelming and is just not clicking for me. Unity is a hit or miss with how much I enjoy using it, and the company behind it is unpredictable. Godot, however, just works for me. I understand it's limitations aren't for everyone, and it needs at lot of catching up to do, but this little engine is doing a lot for me, both physically and mentally. Hopefully the fact that Slay The Spire 2 is being developed with it, will get even more eyes on Godot.

i bounced around untill I landed on godot and immediately fell in love, the way its node system works just makes sense

FYI about 5:53, Godot has had multiplayer for years. I just made a multiplayer game in Godot 4. Server-client, peer-to-peer, RPCs, etc. Godot 3 has multiplayer as well.

One big caveat missing from Unity is it's no longer free to do console ports like it used to be. You have to subscribe to pro for $2k/y before you can make those builds now. It's also a bummer that Microsoft no longer supports submitted builds using the XDK since that means I can't use the older Unity Editor I originally made the game with which means my last console game will never get updates again 😅

Much better advice than these "you have to know every single engine" channels. Pick one and get good with that is a much more valuable skill than withering your life away learning pieces of them all.

also... you can always make your own game engine no... dont do it if all u want is to make games

The thing about Unity is that while the engine and tools are great, the company running it is trash. The fact that they reverted their decisions is irrelevant because they’ve tried this before and will do it again. EDIT: since the trolls and shills are deciding to parrot the usual lies. Allow me to preemptively shut you down: 1) yes, we all know the details of Unitys terms. They’re trash. It’s also irrelevant as they’re likely to change at any time. 2) yes, we know it wasn’t intended to affect most developers, including most who are complaining. That’s irrelevant for two reasons. First: it’s still wrong for the ones it does affect, and second: it’s subject to change. 3) Yes Unity needs to make money to exist. They can do that in ethical ways, by setting prices and allowing customers to agree to it. But they changed the prices after the fact. And it’s subject to change again. 4) yes, Unity has never been free. They’ve always charged a certain amount at a certain point. Key word “certain”. Now they charge an uncertain amount at an uncertain point under uncertain conditions measured with uncertain metrics. And this already uncertain situation is subject to change again. If you still want to use Unity, fine. I don’t care. More power to you. It probably won’t work out well but do whatever you want. But if you want to “educate” me on what Unitys “actual” nature is, don’t bother.

One thing to add about Godot is how lightweight it is - which makes it super approachable for amateurs, children and beginners - and those of us who just don't have much money. While they have some limitations compared to the desktop version, Godot has both a browser and an Android version. I'm currently making a game in Godot on a

Clicked because LÖVE was in the thumbnail... No mention of it in the video?

I miss the days of GameMaker (user since 2004) pre-Studio when we made stuff like legit antivirus software that actually worked since the program back then was super focused for the PC, and it was a massive community in the pre-Studio days, which Godot hasn't reached yet (and that community was deleted to make way for Studio). When consoles and Mac exports started happening, it became diluted. The simplicity of GameMaker tanked as well as GM tried to compete with Unity for some reason.

To anybody eyeing Unreal, do keep in mind that it, for most cases that do not aim for AAA game graphic quality, is a bit like mowing your backyard lawn with a John Deere Ultra-Harvester 9000 designed to clear up multiple square kilometers of fields.

Maybe it was said in there, but it is worth noting that even though Unreal Engine has a steep learning curve because it has a lot of stuff.. it has a lot of stuff. In order to level set Unity for a lot of life quality tools, you need a bunch of paid assets like Odin Inspector, Animancer, etc. where as with UE, you get a state of the art animation system, Gameplay Ability Framework and a ton of other stuff like PCG frameworks for free out of the box. I guess where I am going with this is that depending on your project, the "Free Unity" license might add up to few hundred $ worth of assets or a large amount of hours spent on implementing those things yourself.

I love the mostly nonbiased video. Just an overall breakdown and telling the audience the most important thing, there is no wrong answer, just tey them. I've tried ue4, godot 3.1, and rpg maker. Every engine has pros and cons, see what works best for you.

as a unreal engine developer i want to know waht is that "dokumentation" that you r talking about?

Godot is an awesome game engine but I have two big bugbears with it: For one, it's sometimes easy to get into arguments with its physics engine when you need it to behave precisely, for example making a platformer with pixel-perfect collisions. For two, while the documentation for the 2D engine is fantastic, the documentation for the 3D engine is _painfully_ sparse. All of the people who seem to know how to use it well seem to be too busy working on the engine to actually write the documentation for it, which is a shame because as long as you don't need the advanced graphical features of the established engines it seems like it's actually really good.

I'm gonna say this - if you don't want to learn to write ANY code, you don't actually want to make games. You just like the IDEA of making games.

3:00 Having a project like Godot being open sourced is also important so that Godot can't pull a "unity price per download" move. It also means you have more freedom with your development (not required to make an account and log in) and it's a lot more accessible (free, and very small computational requirements; fast to run). I also agree that Godot has some controversies. It definitely has a 'cult' following, and has some bad actors in play (which most Godot users sympathize with???) But I try to disassociate with that part of Godot's community. For any of you wondering, one example of a bad actor that Godot users idolize is: Yuri Sizov.

I was told by a lot of people (on UKposts) that nobody besides AAA game devs should be using Unreal Engine 5, as that's what "the engine was made for". While C++ is a very complex language and UE5 has a ton of features really only AAA games are using, I doubt their statements that solo devs/non-AAA teams shouldn't use it. Though I haven't used it, but I do code in C++ so I'm unsure. I really don't want to go through the stress of trying to learn C# for Unity, and Godot and GameMaker seem too elementary for my prospects. I'd just rather start using UE5 from the get-go since it is my end goal eventually.

Thanks for helping me lower down my options, so I can get started. When it comes to making a game and doing it yourself because you can't find anyone in your area, it can be a bit overwhelming and hard to stay motivated to make your game a reality. I've had many ideas for games, and have written down the ideas, but when I open up something like GameMaker, Unity, or even Godot, my brains decides to just go into Dial-Up Mode. Being neurodiverse and lacking self-esteem is already a personal problem I have to deal with on my own, but it's nice to know that I can do a process of elimination on which game engine to start my game idea on. Thanks again! Really helpful! 👍

Great video! Just as a side note, I think the godot addon you refer to is called Little Camera Preview. I also got confused at first cause GameFromScratch covered them both in the same video xD

Thank you for mentioning GDevelop! Super happy to be on your radar. - Marcos, from GDevelop. If you have any feedback on what we can do better to be higher on your recommendation list, let me know! I'll pass it along to the team.

best engine is rpg maker in every situation hands down no matter what

I went through the same dilemma since starting out so I just picked Unity, however, I quickly didn't vibe with the engine and liked Unreal better. It's just a personal preference matter, you can't decide by asking people and watching youtube, you gotta pick whatever engine, it won't feel so different after switching up so you're not losing experience

fiiiiine ill wishlist your game :) Great video! Edit: Done. Maybe reduce the contrast on your game a bit? Bright red on blue kinda burns the eyes. Game looks fun!

I like this aggressive version of Sam

I tried so many times to get into Unity but I just couldn't get into the way objects were handled and it always felt like it took a century to open the editor and test a game. It also felt like any time i ran into an issue the solution was always just get some paid asset on the asset store. Ive moved onto godot now and thankfully this has all just clicked for me. The nodes and scripting system just feel right to me. Definitely helps me work faster and get results i want as a solo dev who works w 2D.

I tried Godot like 1.5 years ago, got disappointed and switched to Unity which i tried before Godot but got disappointed and... you've got the idea. After the controversial decision "pay-per-install" i switched back to Godot. I don't like it, actually. I'm an old school so i like frameworks (HGE, LibGDX (but i hate Java, lol), XNA, etc...) more than engines. But i'm also lazy and don't want to give a damn about different platforms differences, i just need a solution so some sort of game engine is the way. Godot is SORT OF ok for 2d games (but only if you don't mind not having access to some basic features like exact width and height in pixels for certain elements) but... it's a huge BUT, actually. In my own opinion it's lightning fast for prototyping but it's incredibly hard to make a final polished product in it. I don't insist, it's my own experience, i believe that there are lots of people who don't struggle with issues i had to face in Godot. Choosing a right game engine is like: while (1);

Great video and very informative, samyam. I would like to add that Unity is free as long as you do not exceed $200,000 in earnings but this is NOT per individual game, that is, it is the global money earnings. On the other hand, it is Unreal, you have to exceed $1,000,000 but it is per game.

Your videos are the best. Thanks. Wishlisted the game a while back!

lovely video as always! your voice is always so encouraging!!

Great analysis and valid points. For me, I'm sticking to Unity!

Working in Unreal C++ as im watching this video. As a former unity dev, Unreal C++ is not very hard. Its the C# with different syntax. Also you don't have to change engine source. You can just copy past engine code into a new file and modify that; that way you don't have to compile the whole engine (Doing that right now lol). You can also just extend engine classes.

Great breakdown. Exactly what I needed to decide which engine to use. Although I still hold major resentment towards Unity, it seems that they will be best for my project. Thank you!

I think it's worth mentioning making a game without an engine. Not to be confused with building your own engine - I mean, building a game, but without an engine. Cobble together a programming language and some libraries (My goto is Zig + Raylib + zig-ecs + Box2D), and just build a game the 'traditional' way. This is best if you already know how to code. Just choose your favorite language and start putting the pieces together. For the (admittedly very few) gam jams I've done, it's worked quite well.

Great Video !.. People should just pick the one that better fit to their needs.. I have used Unity, Unreal and Godot over the years.. it took me a while, but im happy to give a try to all those engines, to finally discover Godot was the one that fits better to me..

Bevy also exists, historically gains github starts at the same rate as godot and has historicay had half the stars, but is newer, hence less stars. Godot has spiked in stars but thats just from a unity incident hype cycle... questionable to what degrees those count as size. star history: #bevyengine/bevy&godotengine/godot&Date

You absolutely can preview the game in godot while running it. That's what the local/remote tabs are for. You can even make changes during runtime

This is a really good video! I've already made a few projects, and I've been struggling to figure out how to make Open world in Unity, but I think I may switch to Unreal.

If you look at the scratch community, you can find people making full on 3d rendering engines and 3d games, for example the mast.

By the way, in Unity 6, the Scriptable Render Pipeline (URP or HDRP) will be the default, and we'll have the flexibility to choose or switch between different render pipelines quite easily.

I did a mmorpg that really worked without open a game engine, also, i just code down on java, has a server that not handle any graphics only the players monsters and item positions, also a grid that works as the world, and some logic to keep players to not fly arround with client hacking, or dupping itens The client just got the close stuff and make it visible on screen listen to commands to send to the server a new attack, with timestemp that helps get both sync well enought to not have to deal with higher complex programming on network... But was a simple one that never get the massive multiplayer point, the most player was about 8 me and some friends attacking each other for few minutes, and killing some random creatures...

awesome video having more control over your own coded scripts allows more creativity

What game engine do you recommend for making digital card games? Sometimes I don't want to get too into the weeds of programming draggable shapes to make card items

Waiting on bevy 1.0 rn

I love unreal in concept, but doing anything in Unreal feels like fighting with a huge machine while trying to guess the magic words to get it to do anything correctly.

PICO-8 > Others

I totally get wanting to go more lightweight. Even for open source projects, reading code that someone else wrote is, imo, harder than writing/reading your own code.

Thank you for this video and going into such detail. I use Godot, and I think you gave an honest review of it. Besides the pricing policies, the main reason why I use Godot is that I have a mini PC and Godot runs really smoothly on it.

Unity is better in my opinion; C# is just the way to go. Not having to worry about memory management is the greatest thing. Unreal throw's a lot of free stuff at you, for helping you build your game. I think you should try out both see which has the best compile times for you and what works best they both work differently and who they work does affect your game and game play.

great video, great info. Do you have any thoughts on Love2D and Solar2D. Specifically about how easy is to export to different platforms

I have some experience with Unity and Unreal, but I discovered Defold from this video and that engine looks like it was made for me. It even has a prototype for the game I'm working on, so learning should be faster by messing around with it.

Great overview of all the engines! Nice!

Step 1. Not Unity

You are so smart. I really appreciate your videos! ❤

so for a long time I found creating my own world that I can play around in is really cool. I was at a bit of a toss up between unreal and unity but after seeing unreal is really good at 3d stuff I just got it but it just didn't work on my computer which sucks so I installed unity. Im mostly worried about switching in the feature since switching programming languages is really hard and I don't want to go though it when going to the other platform. Also watching these videos about how good unreal engine is at 3D stuff just makes me want to really try and get unreal but my computer is a little old so im not even sure if it will work with my laptop, it's a 2019 MacBook Pro

Any Love2d people in here?

I tried all three and still can’t decide because I like and dislike things about all of them 😅 I also have a hard time choosing which game I want to make too which makes it even harder 😂

liked before i even started watching. such a good topic for the moment, and I know you're gonna do good

Appreciate this breakdown Sam. Considering my Java background, im leaning towards Unity since C# has a similar coding structure. Happy developing everyone 🙏🏾

how about CryEngine? I'm currently using it for my own personal projects. It's funny how the game dev community has forgotten about it.

Unity 6 is also about to bring some quite nice changes and improvements which help improving its suitability for large scale worlds, such as automated light probe placements and the GPU Resident Drawer which gives a huge boost to gameobject instancing

Subbed, Thanks a lot for the breakdown, this video is really well thought out. and it came right on time, I just finished Thor (Pirate Software) guide on making games and I'm amping-up to make my own. oh and wishlisted, good luck with your game and wish me luck on my starting journey 💜

i really confused with mathmatical relations in direction or position set in games.Could u make a video about common vector relationships in games? really appreciate that

If you add WebGL, XR and Mobile to your diagram, it becomes more obvious that Unity is the best choice for a more versatile engine.

Professional coder here. Insisting on not coding is not "because you're LAZY;" for most people it's because they don't have the knack for it. Talent is a real thing. There are some areas where some people are just born with an ability to "get" how to these things. Whether it's art, music, playing a sport, or writing code, _your brain is either wired for it or it's not,_ and if it's not, you'll never be particularly good at it no matter how much study and practice and effort you put into it. I'm good at coding. I always have been; even as a grade school kid with no experience, the concepts involved just made sense to me in ways other people say they don't. I have the talent for it. Conversely, I have no talent whatsoever for art. I don't even try to create art assets, not "because I'm LAZY" but because I suck at it and the concepts involved just don't process properly in my mind in such a way that I could ever hope to become good at it. So I buy or commission them instead.

I was thinking about how you're handling the collisions in your game and I might have a solution for the problems you're having. Can't you use the circle equation to cast a ray in every direction from the center of the player? That way instead of only having 4 contact points on your player you would have an area that you could adjust to the size of your player and he would never bug when trying to touch an edge. I'm sure there is a way you can do the same thing using a square shaped area but I don't really know how to do it with a raycast (probably also with some kind of formula)😅, anyways just trying to help. Love your videos ❤ keep it up 😊

Gamemaker does actually have raycasting, its a function called collision_line

Using only engine icons for a video is a bad choice. They can't be googled, so they are useless. And there is no timestamps per engine to find where you mentioned specific engine. P.S. finally found them. In the 14:20 near the end of the video. What a perfect place to finally place a legend to all the images throughout the video.

9:00 I've heard that the fast script reload plugin is inferior to Hot Reload, which is really paving the way in making things faster 🙂

I've been using Unity for VRChat world development, but for other gamedev projects, I've used Clickteam Fusion, which is a good no-code engine for making 2D games, with some new capabilities to also write your own shaders with HLSL. I really wish that it had an option to write scripts to program the games instead of being forced to always use its no-code interface though.

Thumbnail with Godot being a cult is pretty true.

While I think Unreal is cool, new developers should start with Unity. If you can't make something in Unity then you're gonna have a tough time in Unreal, especially if you lack programming fundamentals.

For those more adventurous there are the game specific libraries, two i like are good old libSDL and libGDX, the later is great if you want to code for mobile. And the former lets you compile your code for any modern platform under the sun. Both are FOSS by the way.

I would say that the best game engines to learn/start would be something like ctJS or PhaserJS (With Phaser 2D editor), they are very robust but also incredibely beginner-friendly, no visual scripting but the coding is done in such a way that it breaks you easily into the mindset for programming for video games, using only the basics of JavaScript. All of this make it easy to move to whatever game engine you want later on

It is easy. Pick Unity. Does well in all types of developments.Has more community, assets and learning resources. Uses C# that is a great language, unlike c++.

I'll never understand the distaste programmers have for visual scripting. We are all working with some abstraction of 1s and 0s, there's reasons to go deeper and the same can be said for staying near the surface.

Renpy is great for visual novels or dating sims. Most famously used for the original Doki Doki Literature Club, it's ideal if you want those but are not a programmer such as an artist or a writer with an idea.

Could you elaborate on the VR side of things? Why do you prefer Unity for VR over Unreal? Ive steuggled myself to settle on a decision with this. Thanks for the cool video!

Momentum is important. Unity is stagnating while Unreal grows in leeps and bounds every year. It's only a matter of time that Unreal eclipses Unity in almost every facet of gamedev, if you're just pickikng up game making now, you want to pick the product that's going to be relevant. If you're wanting to take your chances, there's Godot that could emerge as an incredible engine i the coming years. Unreal will continue to push the envelope and increasingly more powerful hardware with INCREDIBLE new possibilities. Unity... no one knows what where they'll be in 5 years, but we just know that right now, it's not exciting. At all. Why learn a legacy piece of software on the way out?

I take offense to your "lazy" comment for non coding folk ... do you illustrate all your art assets or do you purchase them? Do you write all your music assets or do you buy them? Why do "programmers" call anyone who doesn't code or use tools like visual scripting "lazy", "buffoons", "Code clowns" or "fat mamma's boys" yet when it comes to assets for their own games, they will happily grab premade assets instead of learning how to create art. Seems like a double standard to me.

I was looking into this exact issue a few days ago, I'm glad this video came up to verify what I found! I've messed with unity, unreal, and godot now and I have to say godot feeks far more natural to me then the other 2 so far, I also love the open nature of it, thanks for the amazing video!

I'm now starting off trying to make a game, I have 3 of the game engines & let me tell you. I can't understand NOTHING can't code can't visual script and no matter the tutorial I find they just do not make any sense although Unity dashboard is so much more easier to understand as too where everything goes. I want to make a board game & a card building deck game maybe you have some suggestions for someone like me as to what game engine to use & what tutorials to start with. I want to understand how they come up with the code... like jump etc so I know what to write in order to make the player do stuff. Thanks.

Unity still the best

I'm using Unity with Bolt, which is also visual scripting. While I pretty much never manage to finish a game, I'm having mountains of fun just messing around with Unity! Game Maker... I used it since 2006, also made tons of games that I never managed to finish but still had fun making them and playing them from tine to time.

I might use Godot for 2D if it fully supported C# and had a less convoluted UI. Currently, it seems to be in a somewhat awkward position between Gamemaker and Unity in terms of its oop capabilities and what it's able to handle once a project becomes complex.

I love unreal as a 2.5 D artist, it's jsut so much fun to make games in when your mind doesn't think in rows of code.

Godot Editor itself is made with Godot Engine. That means you can make a game on any platform if it runs on that platform from within that platform. (just needs a precompiled engine binary) The editor is available on Android at least. It is just that the phone screen is small, that's the only problem I can think of :)

5:54 godot supports writing in c++ as well as gdscript therefore you can deal with heavy duty calculations quite efficiently

I'm sticking with Godot for now, but I've already used Unity and like it too. You did a nice job in explaning the diferences of each one. BTW which sound controller is that at the begining ? at: 0:09

ok, that was a nice video. However something I think might worth mentioning is that the only engine on which I have seem people with Intel dual core processors that are 2/2, with low clock, only 4GB of RAM and with no dedicated GPU, is Godot.

Should be interesting to hear your thoughts on how you read / refer to the books shown 0:23, like Jason Gregory's, Game Design Patterns, C++, CTCI etc. - and how they benefit your gamedev journey short and long term. Maybe a video, if not done already?

Aren't older Unity versions exempt from the whole pricing change? Like if u use Unity 2017 etc?

this is a solid video Sam! very nicely done😁

My main problem is that I have this dream beat em up game in my mind. And beat em up game is a 2D game where you can walk in the Z axis (just think about jump in this scenario is already complicated) and other than that it's also a mix of a Fighting Game, so it needs a easy tool for creating hitboxes, frame data (1st punch is 5 frames but only 3 frames with active hitbox, 2nd punch has 4 frames, etc...). I got pretty far using unity in a 3D project, flipping everything to 45º (incluinding the camera) to give an ilusion it's a 2D game, but when it got to jumping over objects or creating the frame data for the hitboxes, combos and everything else it just bacame hell... T_T so I just gave up

I personally found Construct 3 to be the best for my purpose. It's super powerful and easy for 2D (and 2.5D). Workflows are super quick and easy to understand... sure it costs ~100$ yearly, but the company doesn't take ANY revenue shares of your game sale (which is a BIG selling point if you ask me)... With that being said. If you want to improve your skills and you want to be attractive to the AAA industry, then you can't go wrong with Unreal, since it is so widespread. But in that case I would much rather specialize on a single- or a couple of skills within that engine and just focus on creating a portfolio of those things. (since big companies look for specialists not "jack of all trades")