ease of use, unity or unreal?

Tomiajayi

Simple Q.
I'm doing my first game project.
trying to keep the scope as small as possible, looking like a 3-5 man team
with me being the only art guy and some coders and animation support.

I'm looking at unity, unreal, or cryengine..
They all have MORE than enough visual ability for what I need.

I simply need whichever one is the easiest to learn/use.

advice?

Eric Chadwick

This is a very subjective question, it depends on your learning style, and everyone is going to have a different experience learning these tools.

I think Unity is initially easier to pick up than Unreal, because they've made it a priority to pare down the main interface to be as simple as possible. However as you dig deeper into the Unity toolset, you'll be grabbing tools from the Asset Store, and eventually you may need more coding skills to get the specific features you need. Unity tends to be a bit more coder-friendly than Unreal. I'm an artist with some limited coding skills, and I'm using Unity daily. It's a good toolset.

Unreal is more artist-friendly, but it presents itself to the new user with a lot more upfront complexity. They have some really good tools for artists, and that complexity comes in handy as you dive deeper into the tools.

tl;dr: both are great tools.

Tomiajayi

Hmmmmmm that's a tough one.
i'm an artist with zero coding skills, but I don't intend to go too deep into the software.
the game im planning is purposefully as simple as possible in scope so as to be done by a tiny group of 3-4.

I've tinkered with unreal a tiny bit (like 20minutes) and it seems like your standard 3d program.
if unity is more simple.. off the bat that actually makes it sound like a winner.

Hmm unreals lighting is hard to pass up though..

Eric Chadwick

Unity's lighting is definitely a difficult mess. You can do great things with it though. And Unreal has it's own lighting crap to deal with.

Tomiajayi

someone recommended I let my coders decide which engine to use..
I think that's probably the best advice I could get!  Though maybe i'll use unreal for a future personal portfolio project

Aldu

Personally, I've found that they tried to make Unity TOO easy to use. To the point where anybody with an actual base of knowledge kind of feel overwhelmed trying to learn it. At least that's my perspective. I have been using Unity since early 2013 though so I'd say that after 4 years of using it, I've kind of forgotten that it was weird at first. I started with UDK initially so the transition to Unreal could have been much easier probably but I started up with Unity before UE4 was out.

Going from Unity to UE4 back when it was a subscription service wasn't too difficult though. Just a couple days of confusion and then all was well. I guess it ultimately comes down to how you learn. Unity gets really difficult when you start trying to bring in complex lighting and PBR honestly doesn't work that well in Unity, at least in my experience. Unreal has a whole lot of complexity right out of the box though.

I suppose you should tinker with both until you decide.

About CryEngine: It's my personal favorite to use but it's not as practical unless you want your lighting to immediately be great. Also: WYSIWYG is nice. Also: the terrain tools are my favorite to play with.

Zack Maxwell

If you're making a mobile game, I'd say that eliminates UE4 on the spot as a good choice. It has big problems with mobile. Project size, ad support, cloud saving, IAP, etc. Lots wrong in that area.
For the longest time, I literally could not compile one of my mobile projects, just because I enabled C++. If I recall correctly, I had to spend weeks of trial and error figuring it out, eventually changing around a bunch of base files to get it working.