Recent Thoughts About Future - (Patreon)

Hey Squad, only two videos left before we get back to tutorials, I'm just taking the next 3 or 4 days to really reflect and get my thoughts together before tackling the next big goal - And, I thought I'd share some of the big things that have been occupying my mind lately.

So far I've been a bit surprised with Unreal's weaknesses. I've always heard it was like "the perfect beastest engine ever", and within the first week getting into it I've already hit 2 major set-backs. The first is the Machine-Learning plugins for Unreal seem to be severely glitchy and not very well developed. Which is a bit sad because I honestly think Machine learning is going to be the standard tech for most things in the future. In Unity it's quite straight forward to train an AI to teach itself, and you can train the AI to learn things that are actually useful in the real world too. There are even Unity ML learning algorithms that can take  generate fairly good Animation data from 2D video footage. So, not having a solid system for that in Unreal is a bit worrying.

The second big thing is it's starting to become apparent that for mobile games, Unity is exceptionally good at compressing file sizes that are compatible with the android and apple stores. To give you some perspective, the Entire game of Macrophage without special effects was 60mb big. To contrast that with Unreal, a blank project starts you at 300mb - (Remember 150mb is the limit for Android) So, while possible to do mobile with external download stuff, Unreal really isn't optimized for phone games from what I've seen so far, and player base for phone games is exponentially larger than the PC player base. Which, is a big risk for a small indie dev like myself who had more plans for phone games.

All that being said, It's only been a week, and I'm 100% certain that I'll find things Unreal does better than Unity as time passes - I really want to give Unreal an honest and REAL full shot. But, I didn't expect to find such drawbacks so early into the start phase - I'm gonna keep diving and practice with it for a few months before I really make my decision where to set-up base long term. Right now, I think the best use I have for it is more of a rendering engine than a game engine, but that's still pretty important as a 3D animator so I think in the end I'll gain something good from this experience -

Anyway, I'm surprised I don't really see anyone talking about these points when comparing Unity with Unreal, I feel like I watched 10 or 13 comparison videos, and somehow it's just not brought up at all lol - But, I'll keep you guys posted -