The Choice
Today's blogpost is going to talk about the engine that W1 is being made with as there were multiple options and choosing the correct engine is important. There are four common options for engines: Unity, Godot, Unreal Engine (UE), or a custom engine. We'll give a brief overview of each engine, a few standout features, and the pricing structure for using them.
Unity
Unity is a well known engine and games made with it are mostly written in the C# programming language. Unity's stand out features are that it's 2D game making tools are excellent and it's very easy to create games for mobile devices. Unity's community has created a lot of well made tutorials and good enough documentation which makes it easy to learn more about the engine or find a specific answer. The pricing structure for using the engine has been turbulent and uncertain over the last few years, but as of writing Unity is free to use until your company is given funding or has a revenue of over $200,000 a year at which point it's a flat fee per employee per month.
Godot
Godot is a new engine and it's main stand out feature being that it's open source. This means it is free to use and anyone can add features to it. Godot games can be written in any combination of C#, C++, C, and it's custom scripting language called GDScript. Godot has a dedicated community that is working on giving the engine similar features to what other engines have and creating documentation and tutorials for it.
Unreal Engine (UE)
UE is a well known engine and games made with it are written in a combination of C++ and it's custom visual scripting language Blueprints. Blueprints and how easy UE is to use for non-programmers is it's main stand out feature. The community for UE has made a lot of tutorials, but they're mainly for Blueprints and they occasionally get outdated as things change. Each game made in UE is free until it makes more than a million dollars, after that UE takes 5% of your game revenue. This million dollar mark resets for each game made.
Custom
This engine is whatever you make it, has whatever standout features you make for it, and you'll know it inside and out. This means that it's free as long as you don't need to pay for any middleware, but it does cost a lot of time to make. This option may be required for some games as they can't be made with other engines. Noita and Fez are examples of two games that were doing things that weren't possible in the available engines at the time.
Verdict
For us (and honestly any indie dev) picking an engine we knew that satisfied our game's needs was important. Our programmer knew Unity 10 years ago, but that was so long ago that it would be like starting from scratch. Since then they've only been working in custom proprietary AAA engines written in C++. Due to this and the fact that W1 isn't currently planned to launch on mobile we decided to go with Unreal Engine (UE) for W1's development. UE's Blueprints for non-programmers and pricing structure were also big draws for us. If you have any questions about this blogpost email us or leave a comment below. See you in the next one.