Why Unreal and Not Unity?

I’m sure I can speak for many of our programmers here in which we all have much more experience with using the Unity engine than Unreal. However, in the case of what we wanted to accomplish for our game, we chose Unreal because of its more versatile rendering, animation, and better lighting effects and to gain more experience within the creation of blueprints. I can’t put into words how astonished I have been at how phenomenal our lighting, rendering, graphics, and art assets have come out so far. The process itself of making these assets and scenes more luminescent is unbelievable, and I cannot be prouder of the artists who have made this happen, big kudos to them. When compared to Unity, the rendering and VFX of Unreal is astoundingly better, which was a large factor of why we chose to work in Unreal instead of Unity.

As for the programming side of the coin, as previously said, a lot of us programmers are inexperienced within the programming style of Unreal known as blueprints. Its taken a group effort between all of us, but I also have to give big props to the programmers as well who have taken the time to research how to learn the ins and outs of how blueprints work, how to recreate certain mechanics that might be a lot easier to replicate within another game engine, and still being able to debug their blueprints when things go awry and still having something to present. It hasn’t been easy, but the results have been extremely worthwhile when seeing all our mechanics in action and working brilliantly. Of course, there are still bug fixes to be made, but now that everyone has been working in this engine for an extended amount of time, things have become marginally easier.

Reece Nadle

Environment Programmer