UPDATE to the UPDATE: Unity has backpedalled really hard, and actually made things better in certain cases. Yet they have still shattered a lot of trust in the Engine. I think at this point it's definitely a B instead of an A. Why Unity isn't pure evil anymore (but not amazing either): ruclips.net/video/_1F_vc2W_kc/видео.html UPDATE (outdated): So, Unity has been doing some weird moves lately, and I cannot in good faith standby the decision anymore to give it an A, it has shifted more to a B or even C with latest events. If you want console support, go for Unreal, if you want something a little easier, aimed at PC/Mobile, Godot is the way to go. Why no more Unity? ruclips.net/video/4AvPhoU9rGA/видео.html
Unity is F tier. Usability is irrelevant if you are bankrupted by arbitrary changes in licensing terms even after the sales of your completed projects.
yeah.. on the positive note though< many game developers will switch to unreal or godot or other game engine, literally anything else is way better than unity, which is a big shame, i enjoyed using unity ,
True. I feel for Unity developers. But people switching to Godot or fairer companies, are for the better for the industry in the long term. @@nikolin2162
@@nikolin2162already making the switch to unreal , no forced splash screen , don’t want 0.2 cents every download even if the game is free , 1 million dollar threshold before a %5 fee
Cactus is a weird guy, before hotline Miami, dude made like, a bunch of weird ass games and a music video game, not a rhythm game, more like a straight up music video but it's a video game
@@FF18Cloud kind of inspiring, that you can make batshit insanity but eventually find a rythm that kicks ass and before you know it. you're game skyrockets allowing you to shine in more ways than one, its like the dream of an indie game dev
The only point I disagree with heavily is GameMaker. As someone that has published games on Unity, GMS, and even GameSalad when I was starting out. When it comes to 2D games Gamemaker is the king of 2D. It has come a long way, is extremely powerful, and very flexible if you learn their GML language. Which is you know Python you pretty much know GML. I primarily use Unity because you can learn one engine and create anything from simple 2D up to complex 3D games, but if I was a 2D dev, I would stick with GameMaker. Everything you need is all provided and simple to use. You can create your sprites etc in engine when creating your objects if you want. You can do pretty much anything you want as long as its 2D. The only thing UE and Unity have over it is the ability to work up to 3D. A big thing for me when working with an engine is the ability to understand it and its organization. Gamemaker along with Unity are both very similar in organization and its a lot easier to understand how things work. Unreal always feels far more complicated for even the simplest task. As for GM visual editor, its far more complex than he is saying here. Maybe he is confusing GameMaker with GameSalad or a very old version of GM... idk. GMS2 change GM a lot and it has a lot of experienced 2D studios using it and very successfully. Another Engine not mentioned here that is big behind the scenes with corporations etc and great for mobile games is GDevelope. It is starting to gain a lot of traction and looks to be a great starting point for people that aren't great with programming.
I believe if you learn Game maker for 2D and Unreal for 3D. You will be in the best of both worlds. Unity is kind of a Swiss army knife right now. Jack of all trades, master of none.
I agree. I have been using Unity and GameMaker for several years. GameMaker has a 2D game development focus and I consider one of the best choice for it. GameMaker have GML, besides Drag n Drop (I never used), a script based programming language spetialysed in game development, with several features for create any type of 2D games from simple to complex and continues evolving considerably. Some information of this video are outdated about GameMaker. For example, the images of the engine belongs older versions and informantions about licences are not the same of the official website. I recomend check out official website, the roadmap and showcase. Despite GameMaker informantions, I liked the video. Congrats.
@@TheRealCzechmarkimo, gamemaker just cant be compared with unity or godot in 2d. While its a lot easier to get started in it, it just cant match the versatility that unity and godot offer. They have better scripting, 2d lighting, shader and material system, particle system, plugins etc. It also doesnt have anything comparable to Unity DOTS or Godot C++, without which you cant create big simulations or rts games etc.
@@askeladden450 I understand that. But I feel better isn't always better. I have used Unity and Gamemaker for the last 6 mths to see what they are both like. Yes Unity offers better particle system, but will take you a lot longer to learn. And do you really need it for a 2D game. If you want a realistic 2.5D game. Unreal is better than Godot and Unity. If you want a flat 2D game (Undertale, Pizza Tower, Hotline Miami) you will do it faster in Gamemaker than Unity. Also Gamemaker is easier to organize all the code and assets than Unity with our plugins
@@TheRealCzechmark Im half way through creating my first game with BuildBox, but sometimes the software gets laggy and i have to pay $297 a year to upgrade to be able to have an infinite amount of scenes and worlds. Is there any other drop and drag 3d game engine like BB that I could try instead do you know?
Similarly, my first game engine was Hypercard on the late '80s/early '90s black-and-white Macs. My friends and I would make point-and-click games with them that would quickly fill up the computers' tiny HDD.
The information on GameMaker is honestly pretty misinformed. At the time this video was made: -GameMaker was already free for educational purposes. -"If you get started you outgrow it in a month, it's very niche". What are you basing this on? It's one of the most general purpose 2d engines out there, it can do pretty much anything in 2d. And "You can make anything with it, it's just not gonna be great". This is just bullshit, GameMaker is limited to your skills as a developer. Not unlike any other engine. - "You can force it for 3D stuff with their pre-made assets and things like that." What on earth do assets have to do with an engine. People literally made custom doom/quake map loaders in GameMaker. You just need to do 3d yourself since it's a 2d engine. Don't get me wrong, it's great that you guys are making comparisons, but this entire section is pretty misinformed. It is just really disappointing that almost all comparison videos on game engines are really shallow, generally misinformed and won't help people make an informed decision at all. Apart from that, GameMaker's license structure has been updated at 21/11/2023, GameMaker is now: -Free for non-commercial use. -One-time fee for commercial use. -Subscription model only for enterprise + console exports.
Interesting to include board games, I think nowadays a lot of people forget about them and it actually could give you a lot of new perspectives you can utilize in the game making process. Good watch guys! :))
I once watched something about board games and I read a comment about the pros and cons of them, I forgot everything except him saying can easily be stolen(the smaller parts) and broken(the flimsy parts )
GDevelop 5 is a good option for beginners. It's a no-code game engine, basically a free alternative to Construct. Pretty good for fast prototyping as well.
I made my first game on GDevelop! it is great to get started! Not overwhelming and you can still make some pretty nice games. Though it's specifically only 2D but totally worth it.
@@Plleyymo They actually added 3d support to the engine in recent updates. It's a bit basic as of now, but it is possible to make a classic doom clone or a simple 3d racing game with it.
I believe with Gamemaker Studio, you don't have to pay indefinitely. You just have to pay once to export the game into a Desktop format, then you can safely unsubscribe from the software.
Game maker is pretty cheap. I have worked in commercial hits and team only had to paid $1000 per game pretty much. Extremely cheap, a rev share of 5% would had been like 50x times expensier
Actually, they changed a few things recently. You now just have to pay a set fee to gain access to selling your games. The subscription only now applies if you want to distribute on game consoles. But that really doesn’t matter for me, given the decline of official gaming consoles in recent times.
I moved from Unity and Unreal to GameMaker because I liked the simplicity. You can do quite a lot with it as long as you understand the limitations. It's fun to use, which was the most important thing for me. I write code in it, not the drag and drop system.
It's also free to download now, and the commercial is a one time 100 dollar, exporting to console is rather expensive though with an 800 yearly though.
This is pointless. You guys have only ever used Unity in a serious capacity. So how can you rate engines you've never used? I use Construct 3 and have never programmed it in javascript. The visual event system is sufficient. I have 2 games published on steam with Construct 3, so it can do desktop as well.
Creating my own engine (or in my case, being part of a group to create one), just for the experience really really helped me. Like you already said, it teaches you about the logical foundation of an engine and tremendously boosts your knowledge about commonly used systems in popular engines. Just by having many years of programming experience and the knowledge from building an engine, I learned to build a reasonably solid game within 2 weeks (1 week learning through experimentation, 1 week gamejam) with unity. If you do have the intention of learning everything there is to it and you wanna feel good about knowing whats actually going on behind the scenes, building an engine really boosts your progress even if it takes more time to actually get into making games. And keep it simple, I recommend just doing 2D instead 3D, because the problems you gonna solve are similar, but 3D is like a cubic factor more work to do, even if its 'just' one extra dimension. Learn about concepts, not any universally applicable world-fomula! Thanks for the video and actually mentioning the "create your own engine"-part, I have rarely seen this done right :)
Sweet video! I think you guys got an unfortunate impression of Gamemaker Studio. I've been using it for a while, and I've never actually used the drag and drop. If you wanna make a 2D game it's really amazing. GM Language is very well designed (feels like something between Python and C). There is a lot more value there than just a stepping stone
I completely agree! I've been using it for a while and moved in to coding everything there pretty quickly. I feel like you can code anything you need in the game. for a 2D game, it's great!!
Especially with so many indie devs that made use of it for successful hits like hotline miami and hyperlight drifter. The GML is fairly capable, not as much as contemporaries like Unity but the learning curve is much smaller for producing an end product without massive scope
If you make a video about ranking game engines you should at least do more research and not form an opinion from hearsay. Because it really feels like, that you didn't put much effort into the segment regarding GameMaker. "It sounds like a learning tool more than an actual production ready game engine" -> Many popular/successful games where made in it: Untertale, Hyperlight Drifter, HoloCure, Hotline Miami, Nuclear Throne, Pizza Tower, Katana Zero, VA-11 Hall-A, Downfall, Rivals of Aether, Nidhogg, Loop Hero, ... "With GameMaker you have to pay 10 bucks a month even if you have 0 sales" -> You can use the Engine for free and only have to pay for the subscription when you want to export / create the build of the game. Everything after that is independent of your subscription. You are free to sell your exported game even without an active subscription. No Royalties. If you really want to, you can finish your game, pay for 1 month, export, and then cancel the subscription. Problem is, if you plan to update your game to fix bugs or add content you need the sub again to create the new export. Edit: typos
I feel like something i dont hear many people talking about is the design of godot. Its just got great architecture for example how it uses its own node system instead of separate entities and components.
yyyeah, i use godot... but as the other commenter noted...if you ever look at the actual underlying code for godot it has several areas that lack optimization or are just badly written or plain weird in terms of design decisions.
Construct 3 should be way higher. Construct 3 is so good and simple for beginners. You can literally make a functioning platformer in a few clicks. Only issues I have found is the small community (making it hard to troubleshoot some things) and the monthly pay model. However, for it's easy functionality for people who don't know how to code, it kind of makes it worth it. At least until you learn how to code efficiently.
The developer of this engine basically crushed my dreams. I tried years to create a professional game studio using this engine and the engine itself fell short every single time. I was even invited by Nintendo to make games for major consoles but the engine itself couldn’t handle it. When the whole community cried out for the developers to fix or change things, the developers acted very bullheadedly and refused to acknowledge the need to change. Hence the F rating. Needless to say my ladder was leaning up against the wrong wall…..
I ran into similar issues for YEARS trying to get basic things to work on mobile. The whole thing is bug ridden, even major core features of the engine often don’t work for years at a time and the developers refuse to acknowledge it. I think the F rating is probably deserved :)
@@UXSpecialist Can you please elaborate what your issues were with Construct 3? I'm currently deciding between Construct 3, GDevelope, GameMaker and Godot for a 4 player multiplayer game.
@@LvZ90 It's based on a browser engine and so if a browser like chrome is updated or changes, it will sometimes break important features within the engine, and takes a long time for the developer to notice it, and then fix it, and then testing the fix can often take a long time, even years in some cases, for it to get resolved, if it ever does. I quit using the engine for serious games because there were errors in the engine that were never resolved and the developer refused to fix them.... I guess if you find a similar game done with the engine that works how you want yours to, then it should work great for you, so check it out and maybe ask in the forums if what you're thinking of making is possible, and it you feel good about it then go ahead. :)
The game maker licensing is a one off $99 fee UNLESS you want to move to console. Then it’s $79 monthly. Not sure if it’s changed since this video was made but that’s a pretty big difference to note.
I actually think Unreal's documentation is pretty lacking in examples (it's basically the same as looking at the tooltips in your IDE). Unity's has become a mess over the years with new features getting separated webpages that don't get updated. Godot's documentation is incredible. It has examples, article-like descriptions of features, and tutorials. All of the documentation is in one, easily navigated, wiki.
been using unreal for my game, 100% agree. Documentation comes mostly from forum posts and tutorials and very few actual blog posts that explain how to use something. So many functions that have 0 explanation what you are supposed to do with them.
It's unfortunate that Opera made Gamemaker subscription-based. I bought GM version 1.4 on a humble bundle with the Windows/Mac Os/Linux exports, and later GM v 2.x on the same. It was a pretty great deal. After using Gamemaker, one of the annoying things I found with Unity was every tutorial spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the UI, instead of actually getting down to coding. When I started learning GM I found that most of the tutorials touched a bit on UI, but got right into writing GML code. Just my experience... but looking at Unity now just because of the extensiveness.
I think putting Construct 3 in F tier is massively unfair. The engine is super easy to use and very easy to understand. It just works and doesn't overwhelm you. I would highly recommend Construct 3 for any beginner. Yes the monthly fee could be too much for some but it is totally worth it for it's ease of use.
We don't really have experience with it but it is hard to recommend it to anyone over some free alternatives in my opinion. F tier may indeed not be where it belongs however. Thanks for giving your opinion! -T
C3 is one of the best choices to make your first touch to making the game. As a teacher I have tons of examples when a child without any experience in gamedev or programming made a workable game in an hour…IN AN HOUR! No need to install editor (it works in web browser). No need to write any code. C3 is a great choice for the first steps. Enjoyable steps with the result and without fighting an engine. It’s not A or B tier for sure. But definitely not F!
Construct 3 might right now one of the best 2d engine, i mean what is $60 or $100 a year (depends on the region) for the subscription if it is worth it, could be at least B or C though and it can handle complex mechanics, been using it for my complicated game, these guys never used this engine and putting it off in F unanimously haha, funny
@@rudolof8540 all exports besides console are free unless you want to charge money for the game, if you do its a one time purchase to get the export license.
@@rudolof8540 Recent update to monetization made it free for non-commercial projects. If you want to make your free fangames, it's absolutely free to use with barely any limitations (other than no console)
I loved this video. Hope your channel gets bigger. You guys are very relaxing to watch! I spent WAY too much time studying game engines. My personal opinion. Several things you need to know before picking an engine: 1- What the game is, and all of its limits. Thoroughly understand your desires first. 2- What you are willing to play. (Both for the engine, and for the royalty structure.) 3- How much do you know? And How much are you willing to learn? (In terms of coding, modeling, art, ect.) 4- How committed are you to the game. (Not necessary for picking an engine, just important to know in general.) Once you have an answer... There are a LOT of engines. Here are the ones I know off my head. ------------ The top teir: Godot, Unity, Unreal Engine The "Low Code" teir: (Consider these if you don't want to learn to code, but will learn to use the engine, these can help.) -RPG Maker -Bakin Engine/ Smile Game Engine -ClickFusion -GDevelop 2D Game tier: (These are all for 2D games, and are exceptional for that. But many above can do that as well.There are a lot in this teir, I can't recall all of them.) Phaser Debold Construct 3 Game Maker (But..don't.) Market Place/ No Assets: (These are things to consider if you need assets for the game packaged WITH the game, so you only need to create the game, not the assets. Some of these are low-code as well. Warning, all of these are "market place" engines, meaning all the games made in them are hooked into a marketplace, you can't put them up on steam, or somehting. So their use case is limited, but they can still make money, just via their marketplace. If you haven't heard of them, then...well...that says a lot about their auidence. Only recommed for hobbies, not for more serious game development.) CliCli Yahaha Core Engine (Mantacore) dotbigbang Crayta Frameworks: I can't mention these by name, but if you are great a coding, you could use a framework, which is like....the moving pieces of an engine, minus the ease of use and stuff. Make your own Engine: If you think of this a solution, maybe it is, but really, you'll spend 10 years making it before you make the game. So...maybe not. You can learn how to do this using G3D Innovation Engine. Which can help you make your own Engine. You could even rig together a lot of open source code (MAYBE) to make your own thing, like building on top of Godot, or Blender, or something else 100% free. But again, only if its necessary, and you'd know if it was necessary, if you know what you can't do in other engines, so, this paragraph is pointless for anyone who IS ready for this option, as those who don't know, don't need to be told how. lol. You ain't ready if you needed to read this. For example, Dwarft Fortress uses its own engine, its a unique game as well, it can't be remade in just anything. It also took like, 20 years or something to make. So... Bonus Round: Fantasy Consoles: For the niche of all niche, with have Fantasy Consoles, which are, typically, ALL in ONE game design tools, but for a very tight use case, to make a game FOR the fantasy console you made the game in. These are...pretty dang cool, if you ask me. But far from popular, so there is very little documentation on most, and very few gamers for the games made. But, this could be a fun adventure for someone. Coding required. Many use Lua as a coding language, but some use a verity of other languages. What makes them cool is that, they are all in one. You can make the music, the pixel art, the code, and anything else you need, in the engine itself, and the engine plays the games you and others made. Cool concept. They often use restrictive designs, so, you can only use like 1 MB for the SUM of your game, or something like that. They are very "retro" and intended to mimic old consoles, and old tech, but, emulated. Very cool concept, very fun for the hype niche fan. Pico 8 Lico 12 Tic 80 Pixel Vision 8 (And, many others. I think a good list of them was on github somewhere.) Hope this was helpful for any passerby!
Great video. A couple of my games are made with Phaser due to wanting to make web-based games like a virtual world, but I think its more properly labeled as a framework and not an engine. You can also use existing tools like Electron or the new Rust-based Tauri to wrap your game as its own desktop application, and distribute it that way. I believe that is what the dev(s) of Vampire Survivors did (however they re-created it in Unity for their Nintendo Switch version). That route is probably not recommended for someone just getting into game development, though. For them, I would really recommend Godot due to the recent pricing changes with Unity and more recently Epic's changes. Even though these pricing changes don't affect indie devs I think the openness of Godot really protects you from anything that may happen in the future- and Godot is perfectly capable of accomplishing anything a beginner could possibly want.
I've tried getting started with developing games many times already, the programming part is not the barrier for me, it's more just how to think about the logic, I have many times accidently worked on solving a already solved problem for many hours just because I assumed it wasn't already implemented somewhere in the engine. Like collision logic. Game maker if the first engine I've been been interested in keep using after a few days on a project, just because it is very easy to get things happen. My goal at the moment is to learn how to think about games, game design, etc, and then move on to something like bevy, godot or unreal. But if you use gamemaker as a learning tool, it does not cost you anything. EDIT: how you think about board games is kind of how I think about gamemaker studio
Learn the engine first then make the game. I made that mistake as well. I am learning more by making a simple game then, I am going to refractor my larger project.
btw.: phaser is not only pure web games. The first version of Vampire Survivors was made with phaser( and it made a tone of cash, they say ), Exocraft, Folklands( that might become the next forge industry), ... just to name a view. Don't count this engine out just yet. 🤔
Gamemaker is now free to use non commercially as we speak. Regarding everything else, pretty unfortunate / uninformed review of an engine you two obviously have no clue about. There couldve been said so much about the pros and cons of this engine, to compare it to rpgmaker but list it even lower gave me quite the chuckle tho ;) Im not married to gm, but ive been using the software for over a decade in its various iterations, and if there is something you can't achieve in it, thats not an engine problem, but a programmer problem. Ive mostly enjoyed your other videos, but if you want to build a following and bring an "informing" format that beginners will trust, dont give us the impression that you havent put in more than the 15 minutes it takes to actually record the video
I mean if we're also putting ttrpgs into the category of board games then they're easily S tier. The amount of unique concepts you can explore with social play is infinite, and the indie ttrpg scene is one of the coolest corners of the game dev scene.
The first engine I ever used was game maker 6 (or was it 5?), this was before the "studio" moniker, it taught me so much about how to make games. I made so many silly little prototypes with it. These days I roll my own engines, but I do think gamemaker is a viable option to make great games.
GameMaker and Godot and Custom made engine are S tier. Unreal is A tier, Unity is B tier. the rest is garb. To make a good game in unity or unreal you need to make it a huge production to be worth the effort. (Very big clunky engines that takes a lot of effort to use.) GameMaker you barely have to learn the tools to crank out high quality. If you're good programmer you either work on a big production in unreal, unity or if you're solo and have LOTS of time you make your own engine.
Good joke, Custom made engine S tier made me laught more than I expected. Godot, Unity and Unreal are the big three and with a good reason but none of them are S tier, not even close.
Spoken like someone who has never made a game in Unreal lol. It's not difficult as an indie studio / solo dev to make a quality game in Unreal and you gain 2d and 3d support by learning it, they even have detailed 2d fluid sims built in to the engine. It is definitely S-tier. Making a custom game engine means you either: have coding experience and know what you're doing or you drank the coolaid other devs put out about making your own engine (who definitely have previous coding experience unlike the new person). If you have a reasonable time horizon for your game, you don't need to be making your own engine outside of it being a hobby or side project and instead use UE, Unity, Redot or Godot until you have built good frameworks for how games are made ( then preferably shipping your game) and go from there.
Vampire Survivor was originally writen in phaser. I also use phaser for work and have built it out to phones. I guess anything you can do with web dev you can do with phaser
There's another almost-mega-hit, CrossCode, which uses ImpactJS, a different HTML5 engine. And there are a few engines as well. HTML5 is actually really good for 2D games
The main issues I'll always have about unreal is within the misconception that always blend between their marketing messages and the production reality. I've helped so many studio doing their game wether in unreal or unity the team size and time to invest for many of the basic feature that are a given in unity ends up like opening up a pandora box in unreal. The production cost of any Unreal production is 5 or 10 times the cost of the same product in unity (not because of the project I'm talking about the same game or equal size projects). That in itself void a lot of the arguments about royalty, also other than the cost itself , everything is harder to make, no tutorial are really good the multicompilations for porting on other platforme is also a complete nightmare, the interface would require 18 monitors, the blueprint are the design pattern no matter you NEED to use them. It's an engine that dosen't do the heavy lifting at all, Yes visually it is cool, but when we (technical artist) comes in the project to build it and establish the performance we'll remove all the fluff that you found beautiful in the first place. So yeah ... unity is SOOOO much better their feature might sometime be shaky (but you'll find an answer quick on google) but most importantly within it's structure it is and engine that does the heavy lifting and manage the low level stuff. In unreal, it's about diving deep into the engine code and work your way into it to be efficient and extend the capabilites, if you choose unreal as a production get ready for heavy heavy cost, lots of dev time, lots and lots of bug when porting and overall.
@@Martinit0 There are sooo many instances of losing more than a week on some niche issue in UE that i can recall all of them but here's a few. Unreal has no fail safe or fallback on any settings, meaning you build on a target platform and it'll fail for days, without much informations or shared knowledge, figure it out. (activated multiview with mobile HDR on a VR ? screen not displaying correct color ? go set the conversion to the appropriate color space on device, etc.) Setting up the build process and moving parts of it is all over the place, you think evrything is fine then realize someone actually overwrite everything else in config files. Then, theres ALL the underneath limitation that are not exposed, not explained and most importantly only documented in the engine code. - Time being in INT32 on any devices except mobile where it's half, resulting in all shaders beinh faulty after 3 mins. (the answer you'll find is "do your own time", nope i'm gonna fix the math underneath) - Bone number limit (makes absolutely no sense, weight per bone yes) on certain devices underneath the hood skeleton cannot reach over 64 bones. You'll never find any info but if you pay for the source code and needs more than 64, change it. Meanwhile in unity, choose platform, build and its there. what you see is what you get, minus some shaders error that could happen from time to time. But everything will always default and put a warning that some setting as been set to x, y, z. I like making games and troubleshooting overall games mechanics, art pipeline, methodologies. Thats what tech art do, however when an engine is just not doing its part and clearly miss the UX mark this much, its a nope on my end. (still use it all the time for clients, but hate every seconds of troubleshooting in it) If i ever was to make my game on it, I would most likely go around 4 month to fully rewrite tools first for multiplatform building, devops and overall never again have to bang my head around settings for any platforms.
@@Martinit0 all in all from what I've seen in my career, the cost of developing in Unreal is close to 4-5 times what it is in Unity. By the shear volume of obscure engine stuff, lack of general knowledge and most importantly how incredibly not streamlined the tools and UX are. It's an engineer first engine marketed so well toward artist. The tools are all there and many of them are cool and well explained by third parties, but overall when the problems arise you completely stop googling for them and dive deep in it to figure it out on your own. Unity on the other end the processes are streamlined and failsafed from the ground up, you can still achieve photo/hyperrealism nonetheless. However, on this part you'll have to enable what you want for it instead of getting stuck with it from the start. These are again broader statements, but unfortunately cannot breach any NDA, which is again why Unreal gets no competent answers anywhere ;) You extend and develop tool for your project, then it stays there forever.
bro pls don't disrespect javascript, it allows for the same code to work cross-platform meaning you can play the mobile version on a touchscreen laptop. It's also easier to learn kind of like Python.
Good point on board games, I’ve converted a couple of board games into RPGMaker and Pixel Game Maker and it’s a great exercise to learn how to convert the mechanics, or when making something new planning it out and playing it in physical form first is sometimes really helpful.
Game maker is only $5 month, you can use the free version during the development and only pay when you want to export the game to Desktop and never pay again. The D doesn't do it justice, it should be 1 letter lower than godot just not being open source.
I started with GameMaker but now I'm learning Godot and it's been great so far. I was going to learn Unity but with the whole pricing fiasco I figured Godot was the safer choice. I see they are working hard to make the engine better and I think it will someday get to the same or better functionality as Unity. Programming is harder than GameMaker's non-programming options but hey, at least I'm putting those 2 years of highschool programming classes to use (20 years later).
one of the disadvantages of godot is that there is no console support. The open source nature makes it impossible. There are companies specifically existing to export godot games to consoles though. I'm full on godot personally! Funny thing is -> it's the whole unity debacle that made me go to godot, and I do not regret it.
Great video! Would love to see you do a follow up to this one, as there are a ton other engines out there. Got some comments on a couple of the entries here, based solely on my personal experiences: Unity: I started using Unity a year ago, and finished the small project that I had set out to make. I definitely suffered from the "multiple pipelines" problem, as not only did I not know what that meant in the first place, and then when I learned what it meant it was practically too late to change. But also stuff like how some assets in the Unity store are made for one pipeline, and some made for another, also became a problem. On top of that, the entire thing felt very feature bloated. So much stuff that I just had no need for, and I felt that I had to learn a lot of stuff just so I would know how to turn it off or avoid it, instead of actually learning how to use the engine to create the game I wanted. On the other hand, I did manage to create the game I wanted with it, from start to finish. But I also think I could've done it better in another engine. Personally, I actually think one of the best points about this engine is that it so very easily can export to practically any platform. RPG Maker: I got very far into a small project in this engine(specifically the MV version), and it's really good at doing the extremely specific thing it's made for. But as soon as you step even an inch outside of that, it's immediately terrible! My project required basically having a new screen with some simple animation appear(basically an automated pseudo battle screen), which would be incredibly easy to program in any generic engine, but it was near impossible in RPG Maker, even after finding and adding 3rd party extensions. Games like To The Moon, Omori, and Yume Nikki are made with it, but I think at least To The Moon would've probably been easier for the developers to make in something like Game Maker instead. It does one thing well, but I think a lot of developers using this engine to make anything outside of that probably did it because RPG Maker itself has been their hobby half their life. That's not a dig at those people, I really applaud that! I just think RPG Maker could almost be considered more of a specific hobby than a choice for a game engine. RPG Maker is to game engines what a plastic bead art plate is to a canvas: They're both used for creating art on. But while on a canvas you can draw and paint with a multitude of tools and mediums, using thousands of different techniques and styles, but the bead art plate can really only be used to place plastic beads in preset positions, you have a very limited amount of colours to choose from, and there's just a single technique. You can make some really nice things using bead art, but it's still going to be nothing but bead art. Game Maker: I've barely touched this one, but it seems interesting. I think they've just changed their licensing options, so you can just pay for a one time $99 license. And the free version can now export to desktop. Own Engine: When I first got into game development as a hobby, about 25 years ago, there really wasn't a ton of options for free(or low cost) game engines out there. So making your own engine was kinda the standard. And it's honestly not too difficult, depending on what kind of game you're going to make. Of course, if you want to make a AAA quality FPS, making a custom game engine is absolutely silly. But if you're making a 2D platformer or adventure game, or even a simple 3D game, it's actually not that hard. I made an engine where I could walk around in a 3D world with first person view when I was around 15 years old. I also made a simple 2D platformer engine for Android about ten years ago. I also started a 2D, top down, isometric action RPG/adventure engine. And I'm kind of a shit programmer. :P Building your own engine isn't only a great learning experience, but it also makes sure the engine is optimized for the game you're actually making. Most of making an engine is just making it show the stuff you want and taking input, while the rest is practically gameplay stuff, which you need to program anyway in any other engine(either through code or drag & drop). Because you never need to make an engine the likes of Unreal, Unity, or Godot, as those engines are created for developing a ton of games. So you'll only be coding one percent of the amount of features they have, and likely also much easier versions of the features, because you don't need all the options either. You can also make your own level editors, or even keep it very simple. For my 2D platformer engine, I actually used Notepad as my level editor, and the game would just read the lines of text in the file. The different characters and symbols would mean different types of tile sprites(like "g" would be regular ground, "w" would be water, and "." would be empty space), as well as some other info on the first line saying which sprite theme was to be used, and such. While the action RPG game just used big pictures for the levels, and would read collision from a black and white image. Other Engines: - In my late teens/early twenties I spent a ton of time in Dark Basic and Dark Basic Professional by The Game Creators, neither of which were great, but it was possible to make games in them. These were extremely code centric engines built on DirectX, but I think those are now deprecated, and they've made "GameGuru Max" and "AppGameKit", which I've no experience with. - My current project is using a small engine called Leadwerks(which is about to be replaced by the Ultra Engine), which I chose because it features an editor similar to Half-Life's Hammer/Worldcraft editor, and it's feature light. While it's not being advertised as such, it seems like an extremely good engine for lowpoly graphics games. And it uses the same kind of "attach script file to 3D object" type logic that Unity(and UE?) uses. It does have some minor annoyances, but way less than my annoyances with f.ex. Unity. And documentation could be a bit better. ;) Still early on in using this one, but I'm liking it a lot thus far. - Another engine I've played with a bit is Adventure Game Studio. It's similar to RPG Maker in the way that it's a very niche engine for making a certain type of old school game(and that it's been around forever), this one being for 2D point & click or text input adventure games. (Think old Sierra and LucasArts games, like King's Quest or Day of the Tentacle.) It's great at what it does, but unlike RPG Maker I think you're less likely to actually try and make any other type of game than what it's made for. - I also wanted to find a simple game engine for my son to play around in, and GameSalad looked okay. My bad for not actually learning it myself before letting him start playing around in it, because it wasn't exactly great. :P Anyway, please make a follow up video to this one! Would love to see it! :D
I like how they give their opinion on GMS without even touching it. What a level of expertise. Comparing it to RPG maker is the epitome of that (facepalm). So sick of "experts" knowing absolutely NOTHING about the engine but being confident enough to put them in the made-up tierlists. That nonsense of an idea that GMS is all about its drag-and-drop feature that's being repeated in every similar video just reveals that people have no clue what they are talking about. GMS is a full fledged engine that has TONS of famous games produced with it. Times more that godot for instance. Noone uses drag-and-drop. Do your research before you mislead your viewers, ffs. edit: not to mention it's basically free and its old licensing model is long gone (which they again have no clue about as well)
Great video guys! I think maybe a good idea for a hobist would be to build a quick simple proptotype on a handfull of engines. Say the same prototype on Unreal, Unity and Godot. Then decide which was was more fun to use, fast, and with less problems.. That can give you a better idea, instead of just jumping head on into an engine for years without having touched any other. Me for example, always used Unity, stopped after the pricing change.. Once they reverted I started a new project, spent a week in it and tried it out in Godot. It really gave me a sense of things I can and can't do on both. Now I'll try the same in Unreal, let's see how it goes.
A good reason to code your own engine is performance. If you want, for example, to make an RTS with thousands of units, the top 3 engines won't cut it. I mean you could use a big engine.. but.. not really. Just imagine making Supreme Commander in unreal :). On that note, i'm glad you put Banished as an example there, it looks amazing and its HW requirements are so low. Godot still best engine.
When I began my journey, I started with Unreal cause it was just like “duh, Unreal”. I spent at least a month trying to really understand it, but everyday felt like a struggle. So then I decided to use Unity, and it was really night and day. I simply felt way more comfortable getting going in Unity than Unreal, and I haven’t looked back since. In my opinion, is UE awesome? For sure. But also, I question how much of those scenes are created by the “average joe” and not by their UE team(s) who utilize highly adept game engine developers and artists… this is important to me because yea it makes their demos look great, but it shrouds, in my opinion, the true accessibility of using the engine. Unity tech demos might be…not as good, at times (cause their tech demos have been better in certain respects), but I do usually feel I can go from their tech demo to my own recreation very easily time and time again. So at the end of the day, pick the engine that works best for you and your team. There’s going to be tons of micro reasons as to why you go for one over the other, and don’t let the hype or tech demos be your deciding factor. Actually spend some time in these engines, as in my opinion, that will be the only way you really know
As an added note, I started using Unity literally when they introduced the render pipelines. Personally, I don’t find it that confusing and they are powerful. Can they be improved, for sure, but as I see it, there is also a reason they are kept separate as they are meant to target different graphical fidelities. It is true many games are still made with the legacy built-in, but there’s a variety of reasons for that I won’t go into now (unless someone is interested), and the use of URP and HDRP are on the rise
Amen to that! yes lot's of marketing spins, but fundamentally the unreal engine is design toward AAA production with engine team able to modify / branch out every aspect of the engine itself. If you want a reliable, understandable structure unity is the best. They convoluted it a bit when the SRP got into the engine and the package manager, I really hope they'll finally some UX pass on the workflows so that newcomers don't really get hanged. But like you said, the "new" project startup is confusing a bit, but once that is cleared up, it's all fine and working the same as before (mostly)
A point about Cryengine: If I remember correctly Crye is working on a new engine for hosting their games on. Will be interesting to see how different it will be and where it would end up ranking on an updated list.
When i seen the review for Construct 3 you guys did buy me immediately. When i touched game development with the original Game Maker and switched to Construct 1.0, i did learned my lesson for a life. However after messing around with Unity, i think probably i won't move out from Godot and RenPy for a long time in the future.
Marnix: "... because of course we're a Unity shop here, our game Forge Insdustry is made with unity and you have been working with unity before so you must be loving this ..." Thomas: "Laughs in pain" But jokes aside, this is a very good elucidation about the engines available in game developing. Neat! And to answer the question on 33:34, don't ask me why but the only engine I could think of is Thomas the little engine, but as there're no trains in this game (yet?!) ...
I played a game I enjoyed called Fae Tactics - it was made with GameMaker 2. In fact, I was leaning toward GameMaker 2 because of that and tactical RPGs and Grand Strategy type games are what I'd want to make. Whether or not you two consider it "good" is subjective and not really my concern. But the pay $100 up front turned me off (they had a different model than they apparently do now because I never saw a "Free until you release" option). So I ended up on Godot after hearing it's oriented towards 2-D and I got it up and going faster than in Unity. But yeah, I don't know about many GameMaker games - Fae Tactics was the first I remember trying (unless the others just didn't use the splash screen).
Games made in D tier engines can be better and sell more than games made in A tier engines. It is not a matter of which engine, but design, art and execution. The best recent example is Balatro, made in Love2D, a "F tier" Lua framework.
I have been looking to find how North light compares with the big 3. I read an article that they using OpenUSD as their native file format? Is it actually available to all or only available in their studio?
I feel like Construct should at least be a C or even a B. I think a lot of the reason people look down on Construct a bit is because its an engine a lot of kids are introduced to first so its hard to find a lot of games make in Construct that show a lot of polish. I prefer Godot by miles but its completely possible to make a good game in Construct, and like others have mentioned its also a really cool tool for making a sort of mockup game. The way it handles code can be pretty limiting but I think as far as code that works like a puzzle goes it handles it well. Its basically Scratch that's all beefed up and I think that's honestly something that makes it kinda cool. I won't ever go back to using it but using Construct in high school was fun.
Another plus for Unreal engine and high fidelity games - You'll get free access to Quixel Megascans library as well as highfidelity Metahuman characters on top of normal asset store.
@@renobuttersThere is 8 directional you just have to draw your sprite sheet that way.. & now there are plugins for first person / 3D, or you can make a side scroller, etc … At this point you can make almost anything… This one dude even made an isometric/orthographic game with all pre-rendered graphics that looks like a ps1 version of balders gate
@@renobutters If the game, gameplay, rpg system, story, music are good, and if it DOESN'T use default rpg maker graphics of any kind (has it's own style), I think an rpg maker game can be very very good. I haven't used it myself though in over 7 years now.
Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion is a good one made using Game Maker Studio and is 3D using custom assets. Talking about the original free version of the game, the "HD Renovation" version was made using Unity.
Game maker is a lot better than you guys gave it credit for here, but I'd still put it no higher than B. I'm switching to Godot personally. Oh for games made with that engine, Undertale and Spelunky come to mind as super big hits.
Seeing Overgrowth on the list of custom engine games: They made that engine open source last year. Workshop-mods allready managed to transform this level-based 3D parcour/fighting game into a procedually generated survival or 2D Platformer.
The uni where I'm studying my game design degree specialises in C# & Unity But I have also used Ren Py & G Develop 5, both very good in their own right I would like to learn Godot & Clickteam Fusion next
I am a huge Unreal fanboy but it can mislead newcomers at first. Its set for high fidelity and realism out of the box. You have to know whats what, and dumb down or disable most features for your use case, especially if you are making a stylized or low poly game.
It annoys me when people see Unreal only for AAA quality games when it's imo the best all rounder on the list. I make low fidelity horror games and it's perfect for me.
Also if you are just starting out limitations are your friend. Unreal is dangerous in that regard, you should be learning how to move a character, but oops now you are playing around with physics based animations. You want to make a simple scene with a single light source for gameplay, but post process and advanced lighting stuff catches your attention, and you are lost before you now it. Limit yourselves if the tools wont do it for you. Start small.
Oh some interesting things to add on Godot specifically. Though I'm fairly new to it I do know that while godot script is encouraged you can still use c# as well as supporting C and C++ and having its own visual scripting language. This might make you wonder why they bother but a key thing here is that you can use all three in your project at once. I think that is really helpful for beginners to learn and pick and choose which scripts benefit most from each language as well as speeding up development time as a whole. Additionally, it really focuses on using scenes as instanced objects so for example your character will be a scene as well as your world and such and that all comes together in your main scene. I dont know if thats the case with unity or unreal so that might not be a big thing but that really helps in neatening up your project.
It's worth noting that Game Maker also had a change of policy recently. Wonder if that'd affect its score. That said, anything that requires more than a one-time payment is automatic F-Tier to me. Avoid as much baggage as possible when doing business.
I tried Phaser as a beginner dev, and the thing with it is that it's really not an engine. It's a framework. You have to do nearly everything, and the tutorials are lacking. I went with Godot and it's way better for beginners.
Hi all. I have been a developer for the last 26 years and I was thinking of started making a game (s/th totally new to me). I will be programing alone and I would like to make a single player game like Satisfactory or Eve online (it is MMO bust still I would like to have a single player version of it). Which Engine do you suggest ?
Satisfactory and Eve online are 2 completely different game genres I feel. If you have C# experience, go with Unity. If you have more of a C++ knowledge, look into Unreal. Godot isn't ready yet for large scale 3D projects. Personally we use Unity, but either Unity or Unreal would work well in this scenario. -M
I currently work with Godot, there are some hurdles for a complete amateur, but not bad at all. I like it better than unity - recently finished my first game, a smaller Star Wars fangame, so I'm maybe biased. But also, good games made with game maker? Hyperlight Drifter is one, one of my all time favourte games.
What about UPBGE (Current / 0.36)? At least when compared to Godot? I was thinking about making a FPS game, but i am unsure if i use Unreal Engine 5 or UPBGE
I actually love JavaScript but I would not *pay real money* to make an HTML5 game in JavaScript... at that point I'd just do it from scratch without an engine
I totally agree with the "If you are beginning, and haven't used an engine yet, Unreal is the way to go!", because I started with Unity, and now trying to switch to Unreal is very awkward and weird for me. I've tried to switch a couple of times, but it's too damn different than what I'm already used to after 10 years of Unity unfortunately...
A very good ranking of the game engines. I completely agree with the ranking. But i disagree (a little) with your assessment of the Godot Engine. What you sayed is true. But it has some feature, that only programmers would be interested in. 1) What i mean the modularity of the Godot Engine. It is created in a way that any user can remove some parts of the engine and recompile it with only the desired modules. A programmer would also be able to easily integrate a new module or functionality. 2) Using GDnative it is possible to use basicly any programming language in Godot. Or use different languages for different parts of a project.
Own engine is s tier. Think about any workflow you like about any engine. You can implement that yourself. You can design you engine api exactly how you want and have complete understanding of it. You have complete low level control with your render pipeline therefore you can do loads of things that would be extremely tricky with the big 3. Best option by far if you have the skills and knowledge
Skills and knowledge aren't the only hurdle... what about time and money? No matter how experienced you are, writing a game engine from scratch is going to take a lot of time that you could have invested in game development instead.
@@CephalonimbusYou don’t need to write your game engine from scratch. It’s best to start building on an existing framework, like Love2D or MonoGame, which already cover the basic stuff and let you focus on your architecture.
i used construct for many years, i like it and have seen some amazing things made with it, how ever the price is insane. i was playing over 100 cad yearly, for what it offers, it tried to add more 3d, well fake 3d stuff, its just a doom 3d engine now, i am having a crisis trying to figure out what engine to use, i am not a programmer, so construct was the go to, how ever lack of tutorials made it very hard to figure out things my self, with out asking on the discord a million times. for help. I have also never finished a game on there, cause how buggy the software is at times. Kind of sad i want to make games but not smart enough to learn actual coding!
They say it's like go, but looking at go and python visually they look similar, however I think the underbelly of the language might be more akin to go(can't speak from experience as I'm just staying with Godot).
@codelinx, I respectfully disagree. The syntax and fundamental characteristics of Go and Python diverge significantly. Go is inherently stirctly statically typed and compiled, while GDScript, in contrast, is dynamically typed and interpreted. Therefore, in terms of syntax and functionality, GDScript aligns more closely with Python than Go.
I've spent about a year working on a game engine which I am now using for a commertial product and I disagree with almost everything you said about it. Debugging, prototyping, optimization, and some aspects of deployment become much easier because you have access to the root of every problem you need to solve. You also aren't really reinventing the wheel when most wheels on the market are square, and don't roll very well...
Seeing this video makes me think UPBGE and Range Engine would be at E or C tier. I really love it though, my three are UPBGE/Range Engine, Unreal and Godot. Currently trying to learn Ren'Py and Cave Engine though
Hate to be that person buuuuuuut...what of roblox? like legit, it is quite a good starter engine....servers/networking is all handled for you for free, free set up, monetization is a bit hard tho, marketing within roblox can be a bit funky, quite a lot of documentation and tutorials, easy to get started, I mean it is pretty good for a starter, also uses lua which is a pretty great language
So, we kind of covered this in one of our game genre tierlists (as part of modding existing games), but generally I think they are around C tier. They're often really easy to get started in, and can offer a lot of flexibility in making very unique games already. However, I've noticed that a lot of projects that started in Roblox do tend to move away from the engine once they reach more success (Unturned is a great example of this). -M
putting godot on A tier invalidates the entire tier list I can get better 3d support on rpg maker with mz3d than godot, in both performance will be trash but at least rpg maker will not crash every 2 minutes.
They did a better engine comparison than ranking. The notes are good, but the ranking is confused. Sometimes they talk about "if you are Starting.." then rank Unreal at the top. Also "learning tools" should be at the bottom. Ranking boardgames above Construct is quite unfair. Making your own engine should be E-F. If you are starting, just pick Construct or GM. If you are making a specific genre that already has an engine (e.g. RPG Maker), then go for it. (I am not taking the time to comment to argue about ranking, but these misleading videos are what caused me and others to go down a path with a stupid engine (i.e. Unity) at the beginning, instead of picking an easy one and simply build something).
As a GM user from 2004, back when Game Maker only focused on PC games, so before studio, someone made a legitimate antivirus program with GameMaker. I miss those days. It was also only just a one time fee to get premium version.
You clearly didn't have the 3% experience with GameMaker to give a decent review, and preferred to speak dishonestly about something you've barely used. GameMaker was bought by Opera in 2021, and with that, it has evolved dramatically. You even show in the video a fully legacy version (from 2014 I believe?) where it doesn't represent what the engine is capable of. I say this as a recurring user since 2012. GameMaker also has a programming language and is even better than the visual mode with blocks (DnD). As it is an exclusively 2D game engine, it definitely deserves an A, since in the current state, it is totally possible to make high quality games, depending exclusively on the capabilities and resources of the developers.
Bros, Rivals of Aether was a hit and it was developed with Game Maker. It’s a game that takes GM to its limit, maybe even a little beyond, but shows the flexibility
UPDATE to the UPDATE:
Unity has backpedalled really hard, and actually made things better in certain cases. Yet they have still shattered a lot of trust in the Engine. I think at this point it's definitely a B instead of an A.
Why Unity isn't pure evil anymore (but not amazing either):
ruclips.net/video/_1F_vc2W_kc/видео.html
UPDATE (outdated):
So, Unity has been doing some weird moves lately, and I cannot in good faith standby the decision anymore to give it an A, it has shifted more to a B or even C with latest events.
If you want console support, go for Unreal, if you want something a little easier, aimed at PC/Mobile, Godot is the way to go.
Why no more Unity?
ruclips.net/video/4AvPhoU9rGA/видео.html
Agree
Daaaaaaaaaang I was just about to comment and say "This video didn't age well". But I'm glad you said this :D
Thank you for putting that update out ❤
Unity is F tier. Usability is irrelevant if you are bankrupted by arbitrary changes in licensing terms even after the sales of your completed projects.
Switching go Unreal engine 5😢
"Unity for life" ... Ooof. That one didn't age too well.
yeah..
on the positive note though< many game developers will switch to unreal or godot or other game engine, literally anything else is way better than unity, which is a big shame, i enjoyed using unity ,
True. I feel for Unity developers. But people switching to Godot or fairer companies, are for the better for the industry in the long term. @@nikolin2162
Life of a fly that is
@@nikolin2162already making the switch to unreal , no forced splash screen , don’t want 0.2 cents every download even if the game is free , 1 million dollar threshold before a %5 fee
They undid everything, so it did age well now.
I remember using Game Maker in high school. I had no idea it was used to make Hotline Miami.
There's lots of million dollar games made with game maker. Hotline Miami, Hyperlight Drifter, Katana Zero, Forager. Many more.
also a little game called UNDERTALE
Cactus is a weird guy, before hotline Miami, dude made like, a bunch of weird ass games and a music video game, not a rhythm game, more like a straight up music video but it's a video game
@@FF18Cloud kind of inspiring, that you can make batshit insanity but eventually find a rythm that kicks ass and before you know it. you're game skyrockets allowing you to shine in more ways than one, its like the dream of an indie game dev
Well...to be honest with you, Hotline Miami does definitely look like a Game Maker type of game.
The only point I disagree with heavily is GameMaker. As someone that has published games on Unity, GMS, and even GameSalad when I was starting out. When it comes to 2D games Gamemaker is the king of 2D. It has come a long way, is extremely powerful, and very flexible if you learn their GML language. Which is you know Python you pretty much know GML. I primarily use Unity because you can learn one engine and create anything from simple 2D up to complex 3D games, but if I was a 2D dev, I would stick with GameMaker. Everything you need is all provided and simple to use. You can create your sprites etc in engine when creating your objects if you want. You can do pretty much anything you want as long as its 2D. The only thing UE and Unity have over it is the ability to work up to 3D. A big thing for me when working with an engine is the ability to understand it and its organization. Gamemaker along with Unity are both very similar in organization and its a lot easier to understand how things work. Unreal always feels far more complicated for even the simplest task. As for GM visual editor, its far more complex than he is saying here. Maybe he is confusing GameMaker with GameSalad or a very old version of GM... idk. GMS2 change GM a lot and it has a lot of experienced 2D studios using it and very successfully.
Another Engine not mentioned here that is big behind the scenes with corporations etc and great for mobile games is GDevelope. It is starting to gain a lot of traction and looks to be a great starting point for people that aren't great with programming.
I believe if you learn Game maker for 2D and Unreal for 3D. You will be in the best of both worlds. Unity is kind of a Swiss army knife right now. Jack of all trades, master of none.
I agree. I have been using Unity and GameMaker for several years. GameMaker has a 2D game development focus and I consider one of the best choice for it. GameMaker have GML, besides Drag n Drop (I never used), a script based programming language spetialysed in game development, with several features for create any type of 2D games from simple to complex and continues evolving considerably. Some information of this video are outdated about GameMaker. For example, the images of the engine belongs older versions and informantions about licences are not the same of the official website. I recomend check out official website, the roadmap and showcase. Despite GameMaker informantions, I liked the video. Congrats.
@@TheRealCzechmarkimo, gamemaker just cant be compared with unity or godot in 2d. While its a lot easier to get started in it, it just cant match the versatility that unity and godot offer. They have better scripting, 2d lighting, shader and material system, particle system, plugins etc. It also doesnt have anything comparable to Unity DOTS or Godot C++, without which you cant create big simulations or rts games etc.
@@askeladden450 I understand that. But I feel better isn't always better. I have used Unity and Gamemaker for the last 6 mths to see what they are both like. Yes Unity offers better particle system, but will take you a lot longer to learn. And do you really need it for a 2D game.
If you want a realistic 2.5D game. Unreal is better than Godot and Unity. If you want a flat 2D game (Undertale, Pizza Tower, Hotline Miami) you will do it faster in Gamemaker than Unity.
Also Gamemaker is easier to organize all the code and assets than Unity with our plugins
@@TheRealCzechmark Im half way through creating my first game with BuildBox, but sometimes the software gets laggy and i have to pay $297 a year to upgrade to be able to have an infinite amount of scenes and worlds. Is there any other drop and drag 3d game engine like BB that I could try instead do you know?
my first game engine was powerpoint 😅 made some point and click adventures during class.
Similarly, my first game engine was Hypercard on the late '80s/early '90s black-and-white Macs. My friends and I would make point-and-click games with them that would quickly fill up the computers' tiny HDD.
Haha, same. I actually made a full "operating system" in Powerpoint, though it was really just a series of fancy links made to look like an OS, lol.
Haha, I did the same with a website builder. Forgot what it was called though.
HAHAHA SAME!!!
You just unlocked a memory for me that I had completely forgotten.. must be like 15 years ago o.o
The information on GameMaker is honestly pretty misinformed. At the time this video was made:
-GameMaker was already free for educational purposes.
-"If you get started you outgrow it in a month, it's very niche". What are you basing this on? It's one of the most general purpose 2d engines out there, it can do pretty much anything in 2d. And "You can make anything with it, it's just not gonna be great". This is just bullshit, GameMaker is limited to your skills as a developer. Not unlike any other engine.
- "You can force it for 3D stuff with their pre-made assets and things like that." What on earth do assets have to do with an engine. People literally made custom doom/quake map loaders in GameMaker. You just need to do 3d yourself since it's a 2d engine.
Don't get me wrong, it's great that you guys are making comparisons, but this entire section is pretty misinformed. It is just really disappointing that almost all comparison videos on game engines are really shallow, generally misinformed and won't help people make an informed decision at all.
Apart from that, GameMaker's license structure has been updated at 21/11/2023, GameMaker is now:
-Free for non-commercial use.
-One-time fee for commercial use.
-Subscription model only for enterprise + console exports.
The entire video is pretty misinformed.
Interesting to include board games, I think nowadays a lot of people forget about them and it actually could give you a lot of new perspectives you can utilize in the game making process. Good watch guys! :))
It's often forgotten because it's harder to sell physical things because of manufacturing and shipping costs.
I once watched something about board games and I read a comment about the pros and cons of them, I forgot everything except him saying can easily be stolen(the smaller parts) and broken(the flimsy parts )
GDevelop 5 is a good option for beginners. It's a no-code game engine, basically a free alternative to Construct. Pretty good for fast prototyping as well.
I think it is the best for all game developers regardless of skill level.
@@TravisBerthelot Yeah, the more I use it, the better it looks. Gdevelop is also a perfect choice for game jams.
I made my first game on GDevelop!
it is great to get started! Not overwhelming and you can still make some pretty nice games. Though it's specifically only 2D but totally worth it.
@@Plleyymo They actually added 3d support to the engine in recent updates. It's a bit basic as of now, but it is possible to make a classic doom clone or a simple 3d racing game with it.
@@billrazor6591i use this for android mobile gdevelop engine i am a 15 year old boy from india 🇮🇳 please reply
I believe with Gamemaker Studio, you don't have to pay indefinitely. You just have to pay once to export the game into a Desktop format, then you can safely unsubscribe from the software.
Really ? Oo'
There's also a free version. You can program and make as much as you want but only lets you export into Gx games with that one.
Game maker is pretty cheap. I have worked in commercial hits and team only had to paid $1000 per game pretty much. Extremely cheap, a rev share of 5% would had been like 50x times expensier
and to fix some bug you subscribe again?
Actually, they changed a few things recently. You now just have to pay a set fee to gain access to selling your games. The subscription only now applies if you want to distribute on game consoles. But that really doesn’t matter for me, given the decline of official gaming consoles in recent times.
GD Script is not based on Go, but Python I believe
GDscript is not based on Python.
You are correct. But it shares similarities in syntax with Python which makes it easier to learn for people who already know Python.
Thats completely false, the actual documents for gdscript say its based on python. @@jerrypie2792
@@jerrypie2792 GDScript uses 90% the same syntax as Python
True. GDScript has python like syntax (99%). It's nothing to do with Go.
I moved from Unity and Unreal to GameMaker because I liked the simplicity. You can do quite a lot with it as long as you understand the limitations. It's fun to use, which was the most important thing for me. I write code in it, not the drag and drop system.
It's also free to download now, and the commercial is a one time 100 dollar, exporting to console is rather expensive though with an 800 yearly though.
Why move from Ferarri to Dacia Sandero
@@cibularas3485 fuel efficiency and reliability
@@cibularas3485 why drive Ferrari when you out of city
This is pointless. You guys have only ever used Unity in a serious capacity. So how can you rate engines you've never used? I use Construct 3 and have never programmed it in javascript. The visual event system is sufficient. I have 2 games published on steam with Construct 3, so it can do desktop as well.
L
What are the titles of your games. I'd like to try them
It always amaze me when so young guys speaks like an experts, like they had 25 years of xp in the field.
@@kamilkacperek91 amaze me more how people take seriously an obviously entertaiment video
There is also Unigine, O3DE, and Several frameworks that would allow to make a custom engine "easier" like Ogre and Raylib.
And my good friend Flax
Raylib is probably the best C library to ever exist for game devs
Creating my own engine (or in my case, being part of a group to create one), just for the experience really really helped me. Like you already said, it teaches you about the logical foundation of an engine and tremendously boosts your knowledge about commonly used systems in popular engines. Just by having many years of programming experience and the knowledge from building an engine, I learned to build a reasonably solid game within 2 weeks (1 week learning through experimentation, 1 week gamejam) with unity.
If you do have the intention of learning everything there is to it and you wanna feel good about knowing whats actually going on behind the scenes, building an engine really boosts your progress even if it takes more time to actually get into making games. And keep it simple, I recommend just doing 2D instead 3D, because the problems you gonna solve are similar, but 3D is like a cubic factor more work to do, even if its 'just' one extra dimension. Learn about concepts, not any universally applicable world-fomula!
Thanks for the video and actually mentioning the "create your own engine"-part, I have rarely seen this done right :)
Sweet video! I think you guys got an unfortunate impression of Gamemaker Studio. I've been using it for a while, and I've never actually used the drag and drop. If you wanna make a 2D game it's really amazing. GM Language is very well designed (feels like something between Python and C). There is a lot more value there than just a stepping stone
I completely agree! I've been using it for a while and moved in to coding everything there pretty quickly. I feel like you can code anything you need in the game. for a 2D game, it's great!!
@@Oomgh Yeah disappointing review of Gamemaker. I love it. Also super successful games made with it. It certainly isn’t a “learning tool”
Especially with so many indie devs that made use of it for successful hits like hotline miami and hyperlight drifter. The GML is fairly capable, not as much as contemporaries like Unity but the learning curve is much smaller for producing an end product without massive scope
Most of my experience with it is with the old version before they had studio
If you make a video about ranking game engines you should at least do more research and not form an opinion from hearsay.
Because it really feels like, that you didn't put much effort into the segment regarding GameMaker.
"It sounds like a learning tool more than an actual production ready game engine"
-> Many popular/successful games where made in it:
Untertale, Hyperlight Drifter, HoloCure, Hotline Miami, Nuclear Throne, Pizza Tower, Katana Zero, VA-11 Hall-A, Downfall, Rivals of Aether, Nidhogg, Loop Hero, ...
"With GameMaker you have to pay 10 bucks a month even if you have 0 sales"
-> You can use the Engine for free and only have to pay for the subscription when you want to export / create the build of the game. Everything after that is independent of your subscription.
You are free to sell your exported game even without an active subscription. No Royalties.
If you really want to, you can finish your game, pay for 1 month, export, and then cancel the subscription.
Problem is, if you plan to update your game to fix bugs or add content you need the sub again to create the new export.
Edit: typos
What a hopeless video!! Reviewing engines they've never used.
I feel like something i dont hear many people talking about is the design of godot. Its just got great architecture for example how it uses its own node system instead of separate entities and components.
yyyeah, i use godot... but as the other commenter noted...if you ever look at the actual underlying code for godot it has several areas that lack optimization or are just badly written or plain weird in terms of design decisions.
Hope it changes with time, seems to get updated really frequently
the original version of Vampire Survivors was made with Phaser :)
Did you guys do an ounce of research? Vampire Survivors, game of the year, 10s of millions of dollars in the solo devs pocket, was made in Phaser.
Construct 3 should be way higher. Construct 3 is so good and simple for beginners. You can literally make a functioning platformer in a few clicks. Only issues I have found is the small community (making it hard to troubleshoot some things) and the monthly pay model. However, for it's easy functionality for people who don't know how to code, it kind of makes it worth it. At least until you learn how to code efficiently.
The developer of this engine basically crushed my dreams. I tried years to create a professional game studio using this engine and the engine itself fell short every single time. I was even invited by Nintendo to make games for major consoles but the engine itself couldn’t handle it. When the whole community cried out for the developers to fix or change things, the developers acted very bullheadedly and refused to acknowledge the need to change. Hence the F rating. Needless to say my ladder was leaning up against the wrong wall…..
I ran into similar issues for YEARS trying to get basic things to work on mobile. The whole thing is bug ridden, even major core features of the engine often don’t work for years at a time and the developers refuse to acknowledge it. I think the F rating is probably deserved :)
@@UXSpecialist Can you please elaborate what your issues were with Construct 3? I'm currently deciding between Construct 3, GDevelope, GameMaker and Godot for a 4 player multiplayer game.
@@LvZ90 It's based on a browser engine and so if a browser like chrome is updated or changes, it will sometimes break important features within the engine, and takes a long time for the developer to notice it, and then fix it, and then testing the fix can often take a long time, even years in some cases, for it to get resolved, if it ever does. I quit using the engine for serious games because there were errors in the engine that were never resolved and the developer refused to fix them.... I guess if you find a similar game done with the engine that works how you want yours to, then it should work great for you, so check it out and maybe ask in the forums if what you're thinking of making is possible, and it you feel good about it then go ahead. :)
The game maker licensing is a one off $99 fee UNLESS you want to move to console. Then it’s $79 monthly. Not sure if it’s changed since this video was made but that’s a pretty big difference to note.
I actually think Unreal's documentation is pretty lacking in examples (it's basically the same as looking at the tooltips in your IDE). Unity's has become a mess over the years with new features getting separated webpages that don't get updated. Godot's documentation is incredible. It has examples, article-like descriptions of features, and tutorials. All of the documentation is in one, easily navigated, wiki.
I think unreal is very painful to work in. can't stand it
been using unreal for my game, 100% agree. Documentation comes mostly from forum posts and tutorials and very few actual blog posts that explain how to use something. So many functions that have 0 explanation what you are supposed to do with them.
It's unfortunate that Opera made Gamemaker subscription-based. I bought GM version 1.4 on a humble bundle with the Windows/Mac Os/Linux exports, and later GM v 2.x on the same. It was a pretty great deal. After using Gamemaker, one of the annoying things I found with Unity was every tutorial spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the UI, instead of actually getting down to coding. When I started learning GM I found that most of the tutorials touched a bit on UI, but got right into writing GML code. Just my experience... but looking at Unity now just because of the extensiveness.
Good luck!
-T
Isn't it like 8 bucks a month..?
@@MrProthall depends of the plan, but i think the cheapest one (except for the free one) costs around that.
I think putting Construct 3 in F tier is massively unfair. The engine is super easy to use and very easy to understand. It just works and doesn't overwhelm you. I would highly recommend Construct 3 for any beginner. Yes the monthly fee could be too much for some but it is totally worth it for it's ease of use.
We don't really have experience with it but it is hard to recommend it to anyone over some free alternatives in my opinion. F tier may indeed not be where it belongs however. Thanks for giving your opinion! -T
C3 and GM should be in same tier.
seeing it in F tier was wild to me, the ability to rapidly make polished games is worth the subscription to me
C3 is one of the best choices to make your first touch to making the game.
As a teacher I have tons of examples when a child without any experience in gamedev or programming made a workable game in an hour…IN AN HOUR!
No need to install editor (it works in web browser). No need to write any code.
C3 is a great choice for the first steps. Enjoyable steps with the result and without fighting an engine.
It’s not A or B tier for sure. But definitely not F!
Construct 3 might right now one of the best 2d engine, i mean what is $60 or $100 a year (depends on the region) for the subscription if it is worth it, could be at least B or C though and it can handle complex mechanics, been using it for my complicated game, these guys never used this engine and putting it off in F unanimously haha, funny
Hi, but GameMaker has GML a script based language specialized for games. And, its free now, right?
Yes. It´s free until nyou want tou save the game as a builded Exe.
@@rudolof8540 Yep, I used GameMaker in the past, it's a good engine. Today I've been using Unity and Godot.
@@rudolof8540 The game has a professional license model now. Its free to use and export to Desktop, Mobile and HTML5 if its a free game
@@rudolof8540 all exports besides console are free unless you want to charge money for the game, if you do its a one time purchase to get the export license.
@@rudolof8540 Recent update to monetization made it free for non-commercial projects. If you want to make your free fangames, it's absolutely free to use with barely any limitations (other than no console)
I loved this video. Hope your channel gets bigger. You guys are very relaxing to watch!
I spent WAY too much time studying game engines.
My personal opinion.
Several things you need to know before picking an engine:
1- What the game is, and all of its limits. Thoroughly understand your desires first.
2- What you are willing to play. (Both for the engine, and for the royalty structure.)
3- How much do you know? And How much are you willing to learn? (In terms of coding, modeling, art, ect.)
4- How committed are you to the game. (Not necessary for picking an engine, just important to know in general.)
Once you have an answer...
There are a LOT of engines. Here are the ones I know off my head.
------------
The top teir:
Godot, Unity, Unreal Engine
The "Low Code" teir:
(Consider these if you don't want to learn to code, but will learn to use the engine, these can help.)
-RPG Maker
-Bakin Engine/ Smile Game Engine
-ClickFusion
-GDevelop
2D Game tier:
(These are all for 2D games, and are exceptional for that. But many above can do that as well.There are a lot in this teir, I can't recall all of them.)
Phaser
Debold
Construct 3
Game Maker (But..don't.)
Market Place/ No Assets:
(These are things to consider if you need assets for the game packaged WITH the game, so you only need to create the game, not the assets. Some of these are low-code as well. Warning, all of these are "market place" engines, meaning all the games made in them are hooked into a marketplace, you can't put them up on steam, or somehting. So their use case is limited, but they can still make money, just via their marketplace. If you haven't heard of them, then...well...that says a lot about their auidence. Only recommed for hobbies, not for more serious game development.)
CliCli
Yahaha
Core Engine (Mantacore)
dotbigbang
Crayta
Frameworks:
I can't mention these by name, but if you are great a coding, you could use a framework, which is like....the moving pieces of an engine, minus the ease of use and stuff.
Make your own Engine:
If you think of this a solution, maybe it is, but really, you'll spend 10 years making it before you make the game. So...maybe not.
You can learn how to do this using G3D Innovation Engine. Which can help you make your own Engine. You could even rig together a lot of open source code (MAYBE) to make your own thing, like building on top of Godot, or Blender, or something else 100% free. But again, only if its necessary, and you'd know if it was necessary, if you know what you can't do in other engines, so, this paragraph is pointless for anyone who IS ready for this option, as those who don't know, don't need to be told how. lol. You ain't ready if you needed to read this. For example, Dwarft Fortress uses its own engine, its a unique game as well, it can't be remade in just anything. It also took like, 20 years or something to make. So...
Bonus Round:
Fantasy Consoles:
For the niche of all niche, with have Fantasy Consoles, which are, typically, ALL in ONE game design tools, but for a very tight use case, to make a game FOR the fantasy console you made the game in. These are...pretty dang cool, if you ask me. But far from popular, so there is very little documentation on most, and very few gamers for the games made. But, this could be a fun adventure for someone. Coding required. Many use Lua as a coding language, but some use a verity of other languages.
What makes them cool is that, they are all in one. You can make the music, the pixel art, the code, and anything else you need, in the engine itself, and the engine plays the games you and others made. Cool concept. They often use restrictive designs, so, you can only use like 1 MB for the SUM of your game, or something like that. They are very "retro" and intended to mimic old consoles, and old tech, but, emulated. Very cool concept, very fun for the hype niche fan.
Pico 8
Lico 12
Tic 80
Pixel Vision 8
(And, many others. I think a good list of them was on github somewhere.)
Hope this was helpful for any passerby!
I know it's not free or widely spread, but do you have an oppinion on idTech ?
Great video. A couple of my games are made with Phaser due to wanting to make web-based games like a virtual world, but I think its more properly labeled as a framework and not an engine. You can also use existing tools like Electron or the new Rust-based Tauri to wrap your game as its own desktop application, and distribute it that way. I believe that is what the dev(s) of Vampire Survivors did (however they re-created it in Unity for their Nintendo Switch version).
That route is probably not recommended for someone just getting into game development, though. For them, I would really recommend Godot due to the recent pricing changes with Unity and more recently Epic's changes. Even though these pricing changes don't affect indie devs I think the openness of Godot really protects you from anything that may happen in the future- and Godot is perfectly capable of accomplishing anything a beginner could possibly want.
I've tried getting started with developing games many times already, the programming part is not the barrier for me, it's more just how to think about the logic, I have many times accidently worked on solving a already solved problem for many hours just because I assumed it wasn't already implemented somewhere in the engine. Like collision logic. Game maker if the first engine I've been been interested in keep using after a few days on a project, just because it is very easy to get things happen. My goal at the moment is to learn how to think about games, game design, etc, and then move on to something like bevy, godot or unreal. But if you use gamemaker as a learning tool, it does not cost you anything.
EDIT: how you think about board games is kind of how I think about gamemaker studio
Learn the engine first then make the game. I made that mistake as well. I am learning more by making a simple game then, I am going to refractor my larger project.
btw.: phaser is not only pure web games. The first version of Vampire Survivors was made with phaser( and it made a tone of cash, they say ), Exocraft, Folklands( that might become the next forge industry), ... just to name a view. Don't count this engine out just yet. 🤔
Katana Zero is one of my fav games of all time - made with Game maker.
You should take a look at it.
I know the game, it has a banger soundtrack! Didn't know it was made in Game Maker though!
-T
A one year update of this video would be awesome :) Many engines have changed a lot in that time.
Gamemaker is now free to use non commercially as we speak. Regarding everything else, pretty unfortunate / uninformed review of an engine you two obviously have no clue about. There couldve been said so much about the pros and cons of this engine, to compare it to rpgmaker but list it even lower gave me quite the chuckle tho ;) Im not married to gm, but ive been using the software for over a decade in its various iterations, and if there is something you can't achieve in it, thats not an engine problem, but a programmer problem.
Ive mostly enjoyed your other videos, but if you want to build a following and bring an "informing" format that beginners will trust, dont give us the impression that you havent put in more than the 15 minutes it takes to actually record the video
I mean if we're also putting ttrpgs into the category of board games then they're easily S tier. The amount of unique concepts you can explore with social play is infinite, and the indie ttrpg scene is one of the coolest corners of the game dev scene.
The first engine I ever used was game maker 6 (or was it 5?), this was before the "studio" moniker, it taught me so much about how to make games. I made so many silly little prototypes with it. These days I roll my own engines, but I do think gamemaker is a viable option to make great games.
GameMaker and Godot and Custom made engine are S tier. Unreal is A tier, Unity is B tier. the rest is garb.
To make a good game in unity or unreal you need to make it a huge production to be worth the effort. (Very big clunky engines that takes a lot of effort to use.)
GameMaker you barely have to learn the tools to crank out high quality.
If you're good programmer you either work on a big production in unreal, unity or if you're solo and have LOTS of time you make your own engine.
Good joke, Custom made engine S tier made me laught more than I expected.
Godot, Unity and Unreal are the big three and with a good reason but none of them are S tier, not even close.
Spoken like someone who has never made a game in Unreal lol. It's not difficult as an indie studio / solo dev to make a quality game in Unreal and you gain 2d and 3d support by learning it, they even have detailed 2d fluid sims built in to the engine. It is definitely S-tier.
Making a custom game engine means you either: have coding experience and know what you're doing or you drank the coolaid other devs put out about making your own engine (who definitely have previous coding experience unlike the new person). If you have a reasonable time horizon for your game, you don't need to be making your own engine outside of it being a hobby or side project and instead use UE, Unity, Redot or Godot until you have built good frameworks for how games are made ( then preferably shipping your game) and go from there.
Vampire Survivor was originally writen in phaser. I also use phaser for work and have built it out to phones. I guess anything you can do with web dev you can do with phaser
There's another almost-mega-hit, CrossCode, which uses ImpactJS, a different HTML5 engine.
And there are a few engines as well. HTML5 is actually really good for 2D games
Yeah, it's great. I'm building for Web and now Steam desktop. The tech is so flexible!
You guys are sleeping on game maker. Has much more market share than Godot. Also has a ton of million dollar games published in it.
Godot is trash and Unreal is too hard to learn
@@cibularas3485 Skill issues.
@@cibularas3485 scratch user detected
@@cibularas3485I must be a raccoon because I've been loving Godot way more than Unity
@@cibularas3485 You must have the IQ of a snail
The main issues I'll always have about unreal is within the misconception that always blend between their marketing messages and the production reality. I've helped so many studio doing their game wether in unreal or unity the team size and time to invest for many of the basic feature that are a given in unity ends up like opening up a pandora box in unreal. The production cost of any Unreal production is 5 or 10 times the cost of the same product in unity (not because of the project I'm talking about the same game or equal size projects). That in itself void a lot of the arguments about royalty, also other than the cost itself , everything is harder to make, no tutorial are really good the multicompilations for porting on other platforme is also a complete nightmare, the interface would require 18 monitors, the blueprint are the design pattern no matter you NEED to use them. It's an engine that dosen't do the heavy lifting at all, Yes visually it is cool, but when we (technical artist) comes in the project to build it and establish the performance we'll remove all the fluff that you found beautiful in the first place.
So yeah ... unity is SOOOO much better their feature might sometime be shaky (but you'll find an answer quick on google) but most importantly within it's structure it is and engine that does the heavy lifting and manage the low level stuff. In unreal, it's about diving deep into the engine code and work your way into it to be efficient and extend the capabilites, if you choose unreal as a production get ready for heavy heavy cost, lots of dev time, lots and lots of bug when porting and overall.
These are very general statements. What _exactly_ is heavy lifting that is easy in Unity but difficult in Unreal?
@@Martinit0 There are sooo many instances of losing more than a week on some niche issue in UE that i can recall all of them but here's a few.
Unreal has no fail safe or fallback on any settings, meaning you build on a target platform and it'll fail for days, without much informations or shared knowledge, figure it out. (activated multiview with mobile HDR on a VR ? screen not displaying correct color ? go set the conversion to the appropriate color space on device, etc.)
Setting up the build process and moving parts of it is all over the place, you think evrything is fine then realize someone actually overwrite everything else in config files.
Then, theres ALL the underneath limitation that are not exposed, not explained and most importantly only documented in the engine code.
- Time being in INT32 on any devices except mobile where it's half, resulting in all shaders beinh faulty after 3 mins. (the answer you'll find is "do your own time", nope i'm gonna fix the math underneath)
- Bone number limit (makes absolutely no sense, weight per bone yes) on certain devices underneath the hood skeleton cannot reach over 64 bones. You'll never find any info but if you pay for the source code and needs more than 64, change it.
Meanwhile in unity, choose platform, build and its there. what you see is what you get, minus some shaders error that could happen from time to time. But everything will always default and put a warning that some setting as been set to x, y, z.
I like making games and troubleshooting overall games mechanics, art pipeline, methodologies. Thats what tech art do, however when an engine is just not doing its part and clearly miss the UX mark this much, its a nope on my end. (still use it all the time for clients, but hate every seconds of troubleshooting in it) If i ever was to make my game on it, I would most likely go around 4 month to fully rewrite tools first for multiplatform building, devops and overall never again have to bang my head around settings for any platforms.
@@Martinit0 all in all from what I've seen in my career, the cost of developing in Unreal is close to 4-5 times what it is in Unity. By the shear volume of obscure engine stuff, lack of general knowledge and most importantly how incredibly not streamlined the tools and UX are.
It's an engineer first engine marketed so well toward artist. The tools are all there and many of them are cool and well explained by third parties, but overall when the problems arise you completely stop googling for them and dive deep in it to figure it out on your own.
Unity on the other end the processes are streamlined and failsafed from the ground up, you can still achieve photo/hyperrealism nonetheless. However, on this part you'll have to enable what you want for it instead of getting stuck with it from the start.
These are again broader statements, but unfortunately cannot breach any NDA, which is again why Unreal gets no competent answers anywhere ;) You extend and develop tool for your project, then it stays there forever.
bro pls don't disrespect javascript, it allows for the same code to work cross-platform meaning you can play the mobile version on a touchscreen laptop. It's also easier to learn kind of like Python.
Good point on board games, I’ve converted a couple of board games into RPGMaker and Pixel Game Maker and it’s a great exercise to learn how to convert the mechanics, or when making something new planning it out and playing it in physical form first is sometimes really helpful.
Game maker is only $5 month, you can use the free version during the development and only pay when you want to export the game to Desktop and never pay again. The D doesn't do it justice, it should be 1 letter lower than godot just not being open source.
I started with GameMaker but now I'm learning Godot and it's been great so far. I was going to learn Unity but with the whole pricing fiasco I figured Godot was the safer choice. I see they are working hard to make the engine better and I think it will someday get to the same or better functionality as Unity. Programming is harder than GameMaker's non-programming options but hey, at least I'm putting those 2 years of highschool programming classes to use (20 years later).
one of the disadvantages of godot is that there is no console support. The open source nature makes it impossible.
There are companies specifically existing to export godot games to consoles though.
I'm full on godot personally! Funny thing is -> it's the whole unity debacle that made me go to godot, and I do not regret it.
Great video! Would love to see you do a follow up to this one, as there are a ton other engines out there. Got some comments on a couple of the entries here, based solely on my personal experiences:
Unity: I started using Unity a year ago, and finished the small project that I had set out to make. I definitely suffered from the "multiple pipelines" problem, as not only did I not know what that meant in the first place, and then when I learned what it meant it was practically too late to change. But also stuff like how some assets in the Unity store are made for one pipeline, and some made for another, also became a problem. On top of that, the entire thing felt very feature bloated. So much stuff that I just had no need for, and I felt that I had to learn a lot of stuff just so I would know how to turn it off or avoid it, instead of actually learning how to use the engine to create the game I wanted.
On the other hand, I did manage to create the game I wanted with it, from start to finish. But I also think I could've done it better in another engine. Personally, I actually think one of the best points about this engine is that it so very easily can export to practically any platform.
RPG Maker: I got very far into a small project in this engine(specifically the MV version), and it's really good at doing the extremely specific thing it's made for. But as soon as you step even an inch outside of that, it's immediately terrible! My project required basically having a new screen with some simple animation appear(basically an automated pseudo battle screen), which would be incredibly easy to program in any generic engine, but it was near impossible in RPG Maker, even after finding and adding 3rd party extensions. Games like To The Moon, Omori, and Yume Nikki are made with it, but I think at least To The Moon would've probably been easier for the developers to make in something like Game Maker instead. It does one thing well, but I think a lot of developers using this engine to make anything outside of that probably did it because RPG Maker itself has been their hobby half their life. That's not a dig at those people, I really applaud that! I just think RPG Maker could almost be considered more of a specific hobby than a choice for a game engine.
RPG Maker is to game engines what a plastic bead art plate is to a canvas: They're both used for creating art on. But while on a canvas you can draw and paint with a multitude of tools and mediums, using thousands of different techniques and styles, but the bead art plate can really only be used to place plastic beads in preset positions, you have a very limited amount of colours to choose from, and there's just a single technique. You can make some really nice things using bead art, but it's still going to be nothing but bead art.
Game Maker: I've barely touched this one, but it seems interesting. I think they've just changed their licensing options, so you can just pay for a one time $99 license. And the free version can now export to desktop.
Own Engine: When I first got into game development as a hobby, about 25 years ago, there really wasn't a ton of options for free(or low cost) game engines out there. So making your own engine was kinda the standard. And it's honestly not too difficult, depending on what kind of game you're going to make. Of course, if you want to make a AAA quality FPS, making a custom game engine is absolutely silly. But if you're making a 2D platformer or adventure game, or even a simple 3D game, it's actually not that hard. I made an engine where I could walk around in a 3D world with first person view when I was around 15 years old. I also made a simple 2D platformer engine for Android about ten years ago. I also started a 2D, top down, isometric action RPG/adventure engine. And I'm kind of a shit programmer. :P Building your own engine isn't only a great learning experience, but it also makes sure the engine is optimized for the game you're actually making. Most of making an engine is just making it show the stuff you want and taking input, while the rest is practically gameplay stuff, which you need to program anyway in any other engine(either through code or drag & drop). Because you never need to make an engine the likes of Unreal, Unity, or Godot, as those engines are created for developing a ton of games. So you'll only be coding one percent of the amount of features they have, and likely also much easier versions of the features, because you don't need all the options either.
You can also make your own level editors, or even keep it very simple. For my 2D platformer engine, I actually used Notepad as my level editor, and the game would just read the lines of text in the file. The different characters and symbols would mean different types of tile sprites(like "g" would be regular ground, "w" would be water, and "." would be empty space), as well as some other info on the first line saying which sprite theme was to be used, and such. While the action RPG game just used big pictures for the levels, and would read collision from a black and white image.
Other Engines:
- In my late teens/early twenties I spent a ton of time in Dark Basic and Dark Basic Professional by The Game Creators, neither of which were great, but it was possible to make games in them. These were extremely code centric engines built on DirectX, but I think those are now deprecated, and they've made "GameGuru Max" and "AppGameKit", which I've no experience with.
- My current project is using a small engine called Leadwerks(which is about to be replaced by the Ultra Engine), which I chose because it features an editor similar to Half-Life's Hammer/Worldcraft editor, and it's feature light. While it's not being advertised as such, it seems like an extremely good engine for lowpoly graphics games. And it uses the same kind of "attach script file to 3D object" type logic that Unity(and UE?) uses. It does have some minor annoyances, but way less than my annoyances with f.ex. Unity. And documentation could be a bit better. ;) Still early on in using this one, but I'm liking it a lot thus far.
- Another engine I've played with a bit is Adventure Game Studio. It's similar to RPG Maker in the way that it's a very niche engine for making a certain type of old school game(and that it's been around forever), this one being for 2D point & click or text input adventure games. (Think old Sierra and LucasArts games, like King's Quest or Day of the Tentacle.) It's great at what it does, but unlike RPG Maker I think you're less likely to actually try and make any other type of game than what it's made for.
- I also wanted to find a simple game engine for my son to play around in, and GameSalad looked okay. My bad for not actually learning it myself before letting him start playing around in it, because it wasn't exactly great. :P
Anyway, please make a follow up video to this one! Would love to see it! :D
Quality comment - I enjoyed reading it.
I like how they give their opinion on GMS without even touching it. What a level of expertise. Comparing it to RPG maker is the epitome of that (facepalm). So sick of "experts" knowing absolutely NOTHING about the engine but being confident enough to put them in the made-up tierlists. That nonsense of an idea that GMS is all about its drag-and-drop feature that's being repeated in every similar video just reveals that people have no clue what they are talking about.
GMS is a full fledged engine that has TONS of famous games produced with it. Times more that godot for instance. Noone uses drag-and-drop. Do your research before you mislead your viewers, ffs.
edit: not to mention it's basically free and its old licensing model is long gone (which they again have no clue about as well)
Great video guys!
I think maybe a good idea for a hobist would be to build a quick simple proptotype on a handfull of engines. Say the same prototype on Unreal, Unity and Godot. Then decide which was was more fun to use, fast, and with less problems.. That can give you a better idea, instead of just jumping head on into an engine for years without having touched any other.
Me for example, always used Unity, stopped after the pricing change.. Once they reverted I started a new project, spent a week in it and tried it out in Godot. It really gave me a sense of things I can and can't do on both. Now I'll try the same in Unreal, let's see how it goes.
A good reason to code your own engine is performance. If you want, for example, to make an RTS with thousands of units, the top 3 engines won't cut it. I mean you could use a big engine.. but.. not really. Just imagine making Supreme Commander in unreal :). On that note, i'm glad you put Banished as an example there, it looks amazing and its HW requirements are so low. Godot still best engine.
Any of the top 3 engines can make an rts even with large numbers of units if you use the right tools, DOTS, MassEntity, Godex, etc.
Beyond all recognition is made in fork of springrts. I love specialized cases like that
When I began my journey, I started with Unreal cause it was just like “duh, Unreal”. I spent at least a month trying to really understand it, but everyday felt like a struggle. So then I decided to use Unity, and it was really night and day. I simply felt way more comfortable getting going in Unity than Unreal, and I haven’t looked back since. In my opinion, is UE awesome? For sure. But also, I question how much of those scenes are created by the “average joe” and not by their UE team(s) who utilize highly adept game engine developers and artists… this is important to me because yea it makes their demos look great, but it shrouds, in my opinion, the true accessibility of using the engine. Unity tech demos might be…not as good, at times (cause their tech demos have been better in certain respects), but I do usually feel I can go from their tech demo to my own recreation very easily time and time again. So at the end of the day, pick the engine that works best for you and your team. There’s going to be tons of micro reasons as to why you go for one over the other, and don’t let the hype or tech demos be your deciding factor. Actually spend some time in these engines, as in my opinion, that will be the only way you really know
As an added note, I started using Unity literally when they introduced the render pipelines. Personally, I don’t find it that confusing and they are powerful. Can they be improved, for sure, but as I see it, there is also a reason they are kept separate as they are meant to target different graphical fidelities. It is true many games are still made with the legacy built-in, but there’s a variety of reasons for that I won’t go into now (unless someone is interested), and the use of URP and HDRP are on the rise
Amen to that! yes lot's of marketing spins, but fundamentally the unreal engine is design toward AAA production with engine team able to modify / branch out every aspect of the engine itself. If you want a reliable, understandable structure unity is the best. They convoluted it a bit when the SRP got into the engine and the package manager, I really hope they'll finally some UX pass on the workflows so that newcomers don't really get hanged. But like you said, the "new" project startup is confusing a bit, but once that is cleared up, it's all fine and working the same as before (mostly)
hoo boy
@@EdgardR. lmao 4 months later and after Unity's announcement, I'm on Unreal. Just can't defend the use of Unity anymore
@@gabe2o2 hopefully it goes smooth for you, it's really a shame Unity decided to do that
A point about Cryengine: If I remember correctly Crye is working on a new engine for hosting their games on. Will be interesting to see how different it will be and where it would end up ranking on an updated list.
When i seen the review for Construct 3 you guys did buy me immediately. When i touched game development with the original Game Maker and switched to Construct 1.0, i did learned my lesson for a life.
However after messing around with Unity, i think probably i won't move out from Godot and RenPy for a long time in the future.
Construct 3 is a very very good game engine
Marnix: "... because of course we're a Unity shop here, our game Forge Insdustry is made with unity and you have been working with unity before so you must be loving this ..."
Thomas: "Laughs in pain"
But jokes aside, this is a very good elucidation about the engines available in game developing. Neat!
And to answer the question on 33:34, don't ask me why but the only engine I could think of is Thomas the little engine, but as there're no trains in this game (yet?!) ...
We do Unity professionally, we even don't work with the other engines, but here is our evaluation :D
I played a game I enjoyed called Fae Tactics - it was made with GameMaker 2.
In fact, I was leaning toward GameMaker 2 because of that and tactical RPGs and Grand Strategy type games are what I'd want to make. Whether or not you two consider it "good" is subjective and not really my concern.
But the pay $100 up front turned me off (they had a different model than they apparently do now because I never saw a "Free until you release" option).
So I ended up on Godot after hearing it's oriented towards 2-D and I got it up and going faster than in Unity.
But yeah, I don't know about many GameMaker games - Fae Tactics was the first I remember trying (unless the others just didn't use the splash screen).
The game "Customer is Always Right" is made on RPG Maker :) Its a hybrid arcade-sort of RPG game based loosely on Earthbound, Undertale, etc.
Games made in D tier engines can be better and sell more than games made in A tier engines. It is not a matter of which engine, but design, art and execution. The best recent example is Balatro, made in Love2D, a "F tier" Lua framework.
Crysis also used Lua for the AI and playing that on Delta still destroys people like 20 years latter.
its just, how easy it is to make that s tier games.
Best engine is UNREAL because with injection of little code with UEVR , you transform any game into a VR game for free !!! 😮😮😮
Where would you put Lua Love2D and Core Games?
I have been looking to find how North light compares with the big 3. I read an article that they using OpenUSD as their native file format?
Is it actually available to all or only available in their studio?
I feel like Construct should at least be a C or even a B. I think a lot of the reason people look down on Construct a bit is because its an engine a lot of kids are introduced to first so its hard to find a lot of games make in Construct that show a lot of polish. I prefer Godot by miles but its completely possible to make a good game in Construct, and like others have mentioned its also a really cool tool for making a sort of mockup game. The way it handles code can be pretty limiting but I think as far as code that works like a puzzle goes it handles it well. Its basically Scratch that's all beefed up and I think that's honestly something that makes it kinda cool. I won't ever go back to using it but using Construct in high school was fun.
Vampire survivor made with phaser and printed 10m$ from thin air :))
Hi guys! What about GDevelop, Cocos Creator, Defold and so on?
Another plus for Unreal engine and high fidelity games - You'll get free access to Quixel Megascans library as well as highfidelity Metahuman characters on top of normal asset store.
"Unity for life."
"I'm not so sure about that."
You can just hear the Curb Your Enthusiasm music there.
FInd me an alternative? Godot is trash and Unreal is too hard to learn
RPG Maker is a very good one, I do wish more game engines/tools only focused on one type of game.
Gotta say they come pretty handy when one doesn't know programming. I had a blast using rpg maker when i was in school.
@@renobuttersThere is 8 directional you just have to draw your sprite sheet that way.. & now there are plugins for first person / 3D, or you can make a side scroller, etc … At this point you can make almost anything… This one dude even made an isometric/orthographic game with all pre-rendered graphics that looks like a ps1 version of balders gate
@@renobutters If the game, gameplay, rpg system, story, music are good, and if it DOESN'T use default rpg maker graphics of any kind (has it's own style), I think an rpg maker game can be very very good. I haven't used it myself though in over 7 years now.
Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion is a good one made using Game Maker Studio and is 3D using custom assets.
Talking about the original free version of the game, the "HD Renovation" version was made using Unity.
Game maker is a lot better than you guys gave it credit for here, but I'd still put it no higher than B. I'm switching to Godot personally.
Oh for games made with that engine, Undertale and Spelunky come to mind as super big hits.
Seeing Overgrowth on the list of custom engine games:
They made that engine open source last year.
Workshop-mods allready managed to transform this level-based 3D parcour/fighting game into a procedually generated survival or 2D Platformer.
The uni where I'm studying my game design degree specialises in C# & Unity
But I have also used Ren Py & G Develop 5, both very good in their own right
I would like to learn Godot & Clickteam Fusion next
I am a huge Unreal fanboy but it can mislead newcomers at first. Its set for high fidelity and realism out of the box. You have to know whats what, and dumb down or disable most features for your use case, especially if you are making a stylized or low poly game.
It annoys me when people see Unreal only for AAA quality games when it's imo the best all rounder on the list. I make low fidelity horror games and it's perfect for me.
Also if you are just starting out limitations are your friend. Unreal is dangerous in that regard, you should be learning how to move a character, but oops now you are playing around with physics based animations. You want to make a simple scene with a single light source for gameplay, but post process and advanced lighting stuff catches your attention, and you are lost before you now it. Limit yourselves if the tools wont do it for you. Start small.
Oh some interesting things to add on Godot specifically. Though I'm fairly new to it I do know that while godot script is encouraged you can still use c# as well as supporting C and C++ and having its own visual scripting language. This might make you wonder why they bother but a key thing here is that you can use all three in your project at once. I think that is really helpful for beginners to learn and pick and choose which scripts benefit most from each language as well as speeding up development time as a whole.
Additionally, it really focuses on using scenes as instanced objects so for example your character will be a scene as well as your world and such and that all comes together in your main scene. I dont know if thats the case with unity or unreal so that might not be a big thing but that really helps in neatening up your project.
We are planning to do our first game soon, and I always thought boardgames could help since I am an enthusiast of that hobby.
Vampire survivor is originally made with phaser
um where's Roblox Studio
If we ever do a follow-up video on this, I'll annoy Marnix so much until he adds it to the list. -T
It's worth noting that Game Maker also had a change of policy recently. Wonder if that'd affect its score.
That said, anything that requires more than a one-time payment is automatic F-Tier to me. Avoid as much baggage as possible when doing business.
I tried Phaser as a beginner dev, and the thing with it is that it's really not an engine. It's a framework. You have to do nearly everything, and the tutorials are lacking. I went with Godot and it's way better for beginners.
FInd me an alternative? Godot is trash and Unreal is too hard to learn
Hi all. I have been a developer for the last 26 years and I was thinking of started making a game (s/th totally new to me). I will be programing alone and I would like to make a single player game like Satisfactory or Eve online (it is MMO bust still I would like to have a single player version of it). Which Engine do you suggest ?
Satisfactory and Eve online are 2 completely different game genres I feel. If you have C# experience, go with Unity. If you have more of a C++ knowledge, look into Unreal. Godot isn't ready yet for large scale 3D projects. Personally we use Unity, but either Unity or Unreal would work well in this scenario. -M
I currently work with Godot, there are some hurdles for a complete amateur, but not bad at all. I like it better than unity - recently finished my first game, a smaller Star Wars fangame, so I'm maybe biased. But also, good games made with game maker? Hyperlight Drifter is one, one of my all time favourte games.
What about UPBGE (Current / 0.36)? At least when compared to Godot?
I was thinking about making a FPS game, but i am unsure if i use Unreal Engine 5 or UPBGE
I actually love JavaScript but I would not *pay real money* to make an HTML5 game in JavaScript... at that point I'd just do it from scratch without an engine
I totally agree with the "If you are beginning, and haven't used an engine yet, Unreal is the way to go!", because I started with Unity, and now trying to switch to Unreal is very awkward and weird for me.
I've tried to switch a couple of times, but it's too damn different than what I'm already used to after 10 years of Unity unfortunately...
Whelp, I guess you can scratch Unity off this list now.
FInd me an alternative? Godot is trash and Unreal is too hard to learn
I don't use unity, but it is still a Goated engine
You will have to redo this video after the shitstorm that just dropped regarding unity install monetization. ☹️
A very good ranking of the game engines. I completely agree with the ranking. But i disagree (a little) with your assessment of the Godot Engine. What you sayed is true. But it has some feature, that only programmers would be interested in.
1) What i mean the modularity of the Godot Engine. It is created in a way that any user can remove some parts of the engine and recompile it with only the desired modules. A programmer would also be able to easily integrate a new module or functionality.
2) Using GDnative it is possible to use basicly any programming language in Godot. Or use different languages for different parts of a project.
Own engine is s tier. Think about any workflow you like about any engine. You can implement that yourself. You can design you engine api exactly how you want and have complete understanding of it. You have complete low level control with your render pipeline therefore you can do loads of things that would be extremely tricky with the big 3. Best option by far if you have the skills and knowledge
Large if
Skills and knowledge aren't the only hurdle... what about time and money? No matter how experienced you are, writing a game engine from scratch is going to take a lot of time that you could have invested in game development instead.
@@CephalonimbusYou don’t need to write your game engine from scratch. It’s best to start building on an existing framework, like Love2D or MonoGame, which already cover the basic stuff and let you focus on your architecture.
i used construct for many years, i like it and have seen some amazing things made with it, how ever the price is insane. i was playing over 100 cad yearly, for what it offers, it tried to add more 3d, well fake 3d stuff, its just a doom 3d engine now, i am having a crisis trying to figure out what engine to use, i am not a programmer, so construct was the go to, how ever lack of tutorials made it very hard to figure out things my self, with out asking on the discord a million times. for help. I have also never finished a game on there, cause how buggy the software is at times. Kind of sad i want to make games but not smart enough to learn actual coding!
GDscript is not a Go alike, you probably meant Python :D
They say it's like go, but looking at go and python visually they look similar, however I think the underbelly of the language might be more akin to go(can't speak from experience as I'm just staying with Godot).
@codelinx, I respectfully disagree. The syntax and fundamental characteristics of Go and Python diverge significantly. Go is inherently stirctly statically typed and compiled, while GDScript, in contrast, is dynamically typed and interpreted. Therefore, in terms of syntax and functionality, GDScript aligns more closely with Python than Go.
.... and where's Unity now. The greed-ridden spirit of EA has bigger reach than Sauron's Eye........
FInd me an alternative? Godot is trash and Unreal is too hard to learn
I've spent about a year working on a game engine which I am now using for a commertial product and I disagree with almost everything you said about it. Debugging, prototyping, optimization, and some aspects of deployment become much easier because you have access to the root of every problem you need to solve. You also aren't really reinventing the wheel when most wheels on the market are square, and don't roll very well...
would love a separate video on the Engine of "Riftbreaker" seen a lot of crazy stuff they developed themselves on their devlog
Seeing this video makes me think UPBGE and Range Engine would be at E or C tier. I really love it though, my three are UPBGE/Range Engine, Unreal and Godot. Currently trying to learn Ren'Py and Cave Engine though
Hate to be that person buuuuuuut...what of roblox? like legit, it is quite a good starter engine....servers/networking is all handled for you for free, free set up, monetization is a bit hard tho, marketing within roblox can be a bit funky, quite a lot of documentation and tutorials, easy to get started, I mean it is pretty good for a starter, also uses lua which is a pretty great language
So, we kind of covered this in one of our game genre tierlists (as part of modding existing games), but generally I think they are around C tier. They're often really easy to get started in, and can offer a lot of flexibility in making very unique games already.
However, I've noticed that a lot of projects that started in Roblox do tend to move away from the engine once they reach more success (Unturned is a great example of this). -M
putting godot on A tier invalidates the entire tier list
I can get better 3d support on rpg maker with mz3d than godot, in both performance will be trash but at least rpg maker will not crash every 2 minutes.
14:44 A good example would be Pizza Tower
They did a better engine comparison than ranking.
The notes are good, but the ranking is confused. Sometimes they talk about "if you are Starting.." then rank Unreal at the top.
Also "learning tools" should be at the bottom. Ranking boardgames above Construct is quite unfair.
Making your own engine should be E-F.
If you are starting, just pick Construct or GM.
If you are making a specific genre that already has an engine (e.g. RPG Maker), then go for it.
(I am not taking the time to comment to argue about ranking, but these misleading videos are what caused me and others to go down a path with a stupid engine (i.e. Unity) at the beginning, instead of picking an easy one and simply build something).
As a GM user from 2004, back when Game Maker only focused on PC games, so before studio, someone made a legitimate antivirus program with GameMaker. I miss those days. It was also only just a one time fee to get premium version.
@@mrswguy8077 sorry, but GMS 2 UI as it stands is terrible, and is not good workflow.
Godotscript is not based on go.
It's a unique language that borrows a bit from python.
You clearly didn't have the 3% experience with GameMaker to give a decent review, and preferred to speak dishonestly about something you've barely used. GameMaker was bought by Opera in 2021, and with that, it has evolved dramatically. You even show in the video a fully legacy version (from 2014 I believe?) where it doesn't represent what the engine is capable of. I say this as a recurring user since 2012. GameMaker also has a programming language and is even better than the visual mode with blocks (DnD).
As it is an exclusively 2D game engine, it definitely deserves an A, since in the current state, it is totally possible to make high quality games, depending exclusively on the capabilities and resources of the developers.
Shills?
Bros, Rivals of Aether was a hit and it was developed with Game Maker. It’s a game that takes GM to its limit, maybe even a little beyond, but shows the flexibility