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The game engine distribution in the GMTK game jam (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Unity has 59% of all games Godot has 19% Gamemaker has 5% And unreal has a bit below 5%

Compared to last year Unity (-4%) Godot (+7%) Gamemaker (-6%) Unreal (~)

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Holy cow, I'm shocked that Unreal doesn't even have its own slice here.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

I would be really surprised if it was more. While my experience with Unreal is limited (I had to make a few small games in it as a part of middleware course on my Master's gamdev studies), it was one of the worst user experience I had.

Now, I love Unreal, and I'm really regretting not getting into it sooner before getting so used to Unity. But Unreal has the following problems, which makes it a not-so-good choice for Game Jams:

My experience with Unreal has been soo slow. If you're working onsite, chances are that you only have a laptop. Even though I had a pretty OK laptop at the time, everything was loading for literal minutes, and just opening the project meant I had to wait for a pretty long time. Unreal is just pretty heavyweight - which makes it an amazing engine for larger games, but not for gamejams.
As far as I know (which may have changed), it's not really made with 2D games in mind, unlike Unity. I'm not sure if you even can have 2D Physics and collision system. Which is another problem for Game Jams - making a 3D game is simply a lot harder, especially if you don't have a 3D artist in the team.
The games you get from Unreal can get huge in size pretty easily, which also makes sharing them and convincing others to play them a little bit harder.

Those are the reasons why I personally wouldn't choose Unreal. But it's based on my experience with it from few years back, so some of it may have changed. But I'm biased since I've always worked mostly in 2D - and if I ever wanted to make a 3D game, I'll definitely rather choose Unreal for that. Because the 3D projects I'm working on at my job that are in Unity is just frustrating experience.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The gamejam was only 48 hours. Not enough time to compile an Unreal starter project. /s

But seriously, your iteration times will not be fast enough for a jam if using C++. You could use blueprints, but what programmer would want to actually do that? And then you will probably have issues with the web export, which grants you a huge visibility boost. Unreal is probably one of the worst engines you could use for a 48h jam.

[–] panachemidi 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

it’s actually my favorite engine for game jams too. you get a great input system out of the box, a really fast build and compile time when you stick to blueprints only (which is more than fine for a jam), and great lighting for practically free when turning on lumen, if you care for that.