If you have any interest in Game Development than there is no doubt you’ve heard of Unity and Unreal as the two titans of independent development. I myself have been using Unity professionally for over a year now, and have been using it for amateur development for nearly 4 years before that, but nothing exists in a vacuum, and with the eventual release of Unreal Engine 5 and Unity’s dichotomy of updates (really, it’s kinda staggering how their most recent stable release is currently two “years” behind the most recent beta release) I’m very interested in exploring new opportunities for development. Before I do any sort of move, or even open Unreal, I need to know what I’m getting myself into first, and that’s where I turn to tutorials.
Luckily, both Unity and Unreal have excellent tutorial sites, and wouldn’t ya know? Unreal has a whole tutorial series on moving over from Unity! They even got Craig Barr to do it, which means you’ll be hearing a familiar voice if you’ve spent any time watching Unity tutorials. That tutorial can be found here
After watching the course I kinda feel better about making the switch. I only say kinda because I figured that structurally Unity and Unreal are similar enough that I could eventually find my way around the editor, and I know that the struggle is gonna come once I start developing and need to start writing C++. At least, I though that would be a problem, until I found a neat little github repo called MonoUE which allows you to write code for Unreal using C#(yay!) or F#(cool? Does anyone know what this is?). Another small gripe I have is every time you open a new window in Unreal it doesn’t attach itself like a tab in Unity, which is really a small thing, but something I noticed that’s probably going to frustrate me early on. On the other end of the spectrum, I think it’s really cool how UE occasionally releases assets from its games as free assets to be downloaded and used in your projects. That sort of thing can really help you either make your own game look better faster, or allow you to deconstruct what you like about the assets so you can replicate a more customizable version of it for your game!
So my next step is to actually get into a project in Unreal Engine and see what happens. Unfortunately I’ve run into a couple of issues with installing MonoUE (that’s on my end, not MonoUE) and to get it in my version of UE I needed to get UE through Github, which is fine, but it means I need to finish setting up UE through Github, and installing everything UE needs to work when accessed through that route. But once I do all that, I’ll get in and report exactly what it’s like to work in a UE editor as someone with Unity experience!
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