So as someone who has never touched game dev, what is the learning curve like - exponential? What is "basic competence" once past "hello world"?
Thanks :-)
Extend a character class, give it a skeleton, an animation blueprint with some animation states that read the character state, hook it up to player inputs, make it do some sounds, and add a bit of flair to some actions it can take?
Can you build a basic ai behavior tree? Run some line traces to interact with colliders so your guy can interact with an object?
Shoot a gun and spawn some bullets that can damage another unit?
Etc.
Unity requires asset generation as well. Because… how could it not? That’s not something an engine can do short of being a 3D model engine on the editor side for no reason when blender is already great.
As someone who blindly learned c++ and c# for Unity and Unreal I would say they’re barely a lift compared to learning the engine api of either approach.
You keep making strange arguments in other comments about how Unity is more friendly to tiny studios for financial alignment reasons which is very odd to me. Unreal is a royalty on revenue. Unity is a cost per seat. The latter is obviously more costly to small studios with no initial revenue.
Unreal is fine.
The first thing I'll tell you is that the tooling for building enterprise apps is woefully inadequate out of the box. The things that come easiest to you, specifically CRUD app building, are much more difficult in a game engine. There are no native UI elements, no theming in the way we've come to expect, and the workflows are all completely different. I was used to building database connected backends, and switching to a state machine model really threw me for a loop. If you have experience building native apps, you're probably going to have a much better time than I did.
As far as learning the interface, that's not so bad. Follow some of the tutorials and you'll be able to get up and running in no time. The rabbit hole for me was understanding WHY things were doing what they were doing, as opposed to figuring out how to do it. Except in those times which I COULDN'T do something natively that I was expecting to be able to do...which happens a lot.
My recommendation is to set up the game engine of your choice, learn how to build to multiple targets, and then craft something you've already done elsewhere to see how you like it. Once you get that going, you should have a cursory understanding that will allow you to flex some creative muscle.
Good luck!
I learned the hard way and realized just how hard game development is and how much we take for granted the human cost. You really really must love games to be involved with them. You cannot do it based on ROI calculations it really requires passion and patience.