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I'm a senior non-game developer, playing at game development in my spare time. I used to use Unity, but I've quit them a few times, and I think this time is for good. UE4/5 didn't really fit my work flow or design style.
So I'm playing with Godot now, and I'm pretty impressed. Some things like 3d imports and animations could use some love, I think... But otherwise, I'm pretty happy with it.
!! The first paragraph but without having tried UE
!! The second paragraph but I've been working in 2D.
I'm think Bevy is pretty neat. It's simple, fast and built in Rust.
Professionally in Unreal 5. Hate it with a passion. Not only is the engine a shared state leaking piece of s*it but the language(s) that come with it make the whole mess even worse.
In my free time I worked with Bevy which is really promising in my opinion. I hope their editor will be as amazing as the rest of the framework.
Recently I also tried Fyrox. It is nice, probably usable for some smaller things, but damn it feels a lot like Unreal again with going a OO-like paradigm. Of course little to no memory-safety issues it being developed in Rust as well (+ a runtime borrow checker they implemented on top to check on shared writes to Resources, Nodes, etc.), but compared to ECS it feels terribly clunky.
ECS just feel sooo right! Also, if someone needs a more mature engine than Bevy, don't go for Unity or Unreal - Take a look at Godot. It's FOSS and even supports Rust bindings (and I do think Rust the shit and will be a big deal in the future).
As a hobbyist, Godot is probably the most "fun" engine I've worked in. The software itself feels like a toy, similar to Gamemaker (at least from what I remember when I used it like 10 years ago as a kid lol). Coming from C# background, using GDscript wasn't as bad as I thought, and making small projects in a weekend has really itched the problem-solving part in my brain. I'm trying to re-create popular flash games that I remember playing back in the day and seeing what improvements I can make.
I am enjoying Solar2D! Lua based engine for desktop and mobile, working on a virtual pet game. So easy to get something working quickly
for my little silly experiments I use Raylib (C or the Go bindings).
https://phaser.io/ - web-first, so Easy to distribute even games made for game jams
I had to build a game in phaser 3 for my "html" course and I swore I would never try to game dev in js again.
I know we were using a very old version and we had very minimal guidance... have I missed something big that makes it tolerable to work with or do i just need more js experience?
The way you put it, it sounds that you have issues with the language. I can relate to that, but JS is what browsers understand natively. Probably using TypeScript is a good alternative, as static typing helps you keep afloat as the project grows.
As for Phaser itself (can be used with TypeScript), it depends what kind of game you're making. Even older versions of phaser have the typical programming affordances to make 2D games like assets and physics. Having said that, it's fair that other engines have visual editors, and possibly more tutorials and other resources.
But yes, phaser is hardly HTML, so weird choice for the course.
Professionally: Unreal Engine 5 Hobby: Godot and Unreal Engine 5
Godot is fun, quick and small. Unreal is powerful, bulky and big.
Defold. Fast and powerful, and so easy to deploy on any platform.
Unreal Engine. I've been enjoying learning it and building it. It's powerful and so far has solved every problem I've had without much pain.