Pivot to Unreal Exploration

STEP Media Explains Unreal

TL;DR

• Unity is good but I did not know programming
• Unity templates great saves time but customising them hard need c#
• Unreal Large project files
• Unreal good for 3D Games
• Unreal has templates like unity but less on their store

Intro

In this blog post I will be going over some thoughts why I am giving Unreal a try again as An alternative to unreal. I started to struggle with unity and felt I spent too much time programming rather than make the game.

I decided to try again in 3D which might not be a good choice long term but we will see. I also had a bit more success with unreal making 1-2 small games and lacked experience in C# coding and Publishing with unity.

It was going to be released in a short time but felt I lack the time to make 2D Sprites and animate and code them up.

Project Sun and Moon

Here is a short context of the project I am trying to make, a vampire survivors clone initially 2D Based. But I saw that there is a shooter, Vampire Hunters so decided to try recreating that instead.

The game will feature the same core loop of waves of enemies and you have to take them down with your weapons and upgrade and survive as long as you can on the map.

Making a Game in Unity

I have been trying to make games in Unity but I feel I spend a lot of time coding rather than making and desingin something playable. C# is good though as a language intro to the C Family of code.

I was trying to make a VSurvivors (Vampire Survivors) Clone. I looked at various tutorials on youtube and got some c# courses to learn the language. I mean making a clone would be easy right?

My thought was that if I am working in typescript and javascript I should have no problems making this simple game.

Turns out I was wrong.

C# though great and easier then C still has a learning curve and is not as forgiving as Javascript. Unity which is a framework of a game engine has its own quirks and issues as well.

So I realised I was learning more programming and learning unity than making a game. OOPs, Linking namespaces and other C# concepts.

I ended up trying to fix a template I got, a free one from Github than making a game.

I spent a lot of time building simple things like a character config and there can be endless methods and ways to solve the same problem, it like using JSON file, Scriptable objects etc, all these just added time away from making the game.

Using a Paid Template (Unity)

P3D: Survivors Engine (Top Down Game Template) | Systems | Unity Asset Store

Use P3D: Survivors Engine (Top Down Game Template) from Phoenix3D Studio to elevate your next project. Find this & more Systems and templates on the Unity Asset Store.

Unity Asset StorePhoenix3D Studio

So my solution was to get a template from Unity Store to cut down time to make the game. Turns out I was wrong again. Even though the creator was helpful in their discord, but it was slow going back and forth.

It was not easy to learn even though better than GitHub templates but it turns out that if I did not design the system I had not clue where to start and would be learning another framework again within Unity.

Unity has a lot of power but it comes at a costs of understanding technical things. If you don't understand how things work at the code level you can't really make changes fast.

Trying Unreal 5

At this stage I decided to go back to unreal and blueprints which I felt had a bit more success than C#.

For starter Unreal Its Opiniated! It defeinatly has a way of doing things and putting your game together

there is a way of doing things from setting scenes to the game manager or game modes. You can’t really go wrong with blueprints I managed to code up the UI Sceen in 2 days unlike Unity I spent a week learning how UXML or Unity UI works.

Blueprints for now

C++ is hard harder than C#, but Blueprints for now, which is nice you are come from a visual design background. It can get messy but at least you can see where the code is flowing through.

Need to still build systems.

One thing Unreal Lacks from Unity is premade systems there a few on the FAB (Formerly Unreal Store) but it seems to be plugins (Which could be C++) or blueprint templates.

Not all of it can be integrated easily, if documentation is limited.

I do feel Unreal has its own issues if you want to bend the engine to your own you need to get into C++ coding but blueprints can make quite a bit of systems like menu loading and other smaller sub systems without breaking out into the code editor.

Anyway that’s all for this post so Buy Me a Coffee if you liked this post update To support making games.

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