- Godot seems immature in many ways (for example, Web export is currently broken on macOS/iOS according to their docs)
- Unreal seems like major overkill and apparently not well suited for 2D
Is there anything else that is a serious contender?
How can you protect yourself to not end up in a similar situation as the author?
It has been used to make The Case of the Golden Idol, Brotato, Cassette Beasts, and Dome Keeper. It's indisputably a production-grade engine.
As a Rust enthusiast and small-time Bevy contributor, I wish I could recommend Bevy in the same way, but Bevy is actually immature, for real. People do make games with it, some even commercial, but it is what it is.
1. 2D
2. Only target one kind of platforms (e.g. only Win+Linux+Mac but no mobile, or only mobile but no desktop/console)
You'll find almost any open source engine works. Rolling your own 2D engine based on a barebone one is just like writing a parser. If you never wrote one it seems like an impossibly hard problem. It's not.
Modern 3D graphics are built upon a lot of algorithms. From TAA to volumetric rendering to cascading shadow maps to SSAO to voxel-based global illumination... the list goes on an on. Surprisingly, none of these algorithm is truly hard. But you need to implement all of them to make things visually match up modern standard.
For 2D it's more like you know how to pass the offset to a shader? Boom you have sprite animation. If you want some super unique effects with clever shaders, yeah that's not easy, but using Unity doesn't make it less hard anyway.
Webassembly support is spotty, though in progress AFAICT.
Used by a few 2D games like Stsrdew Valley and Celeste.
- it's production ready, available on all the main platforms
- lightweight and performant
- best for 2d, though it's a 3d engine at heart
You can easily develop a low end game in unreal.
I would suggest just using Godot for 2D. With time it should be fine.
For 3D, even AAA have been going to Unreal so that may be best. It's not ideal but the business model of 5% works compared to Unity promising to avoid revenue splitting.
The Godot engine might be less complete than Unity, but calling it immature is a bit strong IMHO.
For devs having been burnt by a proprietary engine, namely Unity, the Open Source aspect alone is a good reason to switch.
So Godot is bound to get far more users, and consequently, develop and improve significantly.
Is there any way you can protect yourself against that when choosing a proprietary engine?
Long story short, you might want to wait 1 or 2 months to let the dust settle before you pick an engine.
No idea how/if that's legal, but it seems to be what people are saying happened, and no-one seems to be arguing that point.