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Comment by tavavex | Hacker News Reader

Unless your needs are extremely specific and necessitate replacing most of the engine, Unity is probably not limiting your capabilities. The default packages are extensive and allow for basic game-making without writing that much actual code, but large developers will almost certainly swap default Unity components for their own for parts that need them, while the engine manages other parts like sound and input handling, multi-platform deployment and so on.

Unity is by far the most used engine in the world and tons of extremely different games were made with it. Subnautica, Rimworld, Hollow Knight, Beat Saber, the Ori games, Disco Elysium - none of them seemed to face any issues with being made in Unity. The "Unity games are bad" stereotype annoys me - it's bound to have a bunch of shovelware made on it with how many resources there are for learning it (and Unity being free), but it's popular for a reason.

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>none of them seemed to face any issues with being made in Unity.

I'm sure they did. But I wager there is no such thing as "smooth development". Every engine has its quirks, every team has its odd dynamics and clashes.

engines are there to make development smoother, not smooth.

>it's bound to have a bunch of shovelware made on it with how many resources there are for learning it (and Unity being free), but it's popular for a reason.

To be fair, that one is more on Unity. You had to pay to remove the splashscreen, so that meant low effort titles would have "MADE WITH UNITY" front and center, where higher budget titles could remove the logo. It was great for awareness, but it completely reversed the perception of the engine quality as a result.

(disclaimer: I used to work at unity)

> I'm sure they did. But I wager there is no such thing as "smooth development". Every engine has its quirks, every team has its odd dynamics and clashes.

That's not really what I wanted to convey. I'm not saying that their development process became spotless as a result of using Unity, but that these developers don't appear to be constrained by the engine in this extreme fashion like what the top commenter was suggesting - they successfully used it to make wildly different (and sometimes boundary-pushing) products.

> You had to pay to remove the splashscreen, so that meant low effort titles would have "MADE WITH UNITY" front and center, where higher budget titles could remove the logo.

Yeah, I agree with this. Almost all people have no idea what engine any given game runs on (if any), and professional developers will only put that in the credits, if at all. Admittedly, I can't think of any better ways of introducing some limitation for free users that wouldn't get overbearing - interfering with gameplay or other interactive stuff is probably a no-no, so a splash screen is one of the few viable options.

I would bet that more than 0% of that perception, at least from developers, comes from how _fucking awful_ the Unity editor is. It's one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used. The games you can make with Unity are absolutely very impressive, but the tools Unity provides are just awful, and give a lot of newbie developers the perception that Unity is a hacked together pile of garbage (which...it is, but so are all game engines). Godot, Unreal, and GameMaker are, I would say, the main competitors to Unity in the Indie space, and all three of them have much higher quality editors than Unity's.

The unreal engine editor is way worse than unity though, unreal doesn't even let you move around files without a massive headache, while in unity moving files is trivial and almost never causes issues. Not to mention that C++ in unreal is horrible to work with and blueprints lacks a lot of features, unity C# is far superior to both for productivity.

If your game doesn't do anything complicated so you don't need to code a lot, then sure unreal could work since by far the biggest problem is iterating on code for the different components and actors. Adding or removing or renaming fields or refactoring folder structure and then go and update them in the blueprints takes forever while in unity that is really easy.

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