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Comment by oneoff786 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of it is learning the engine api and how different parts interact. The basic competence level requires a pretty large body of knowledge. Can you, for example,

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.

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You absolutely need those basic skills to be in a position to produce anything on Unreal Engine but its the sheer amount of work that comes after to produce anything of value is where the challenge is in my opinion. It almost certainly involves a dedicated asset generation capacity to generate enough novelty and/or a polished, smooth mechanic that can handle all the edge cases thrown at it. And there's a reason why the UE tools out of the box are so limited and frustrating to use to the point that its impossible to work on anything without opening up your wallet to purchase productivity tools sold on its marketplace and still struggle with the workload. Especially when it requires you to become proficient at C++ because blueprint's value drops outside animation rigging and VFX, both of which Unity's 3rd party marketplace tools have filled rendering UE's initial user friendliness nil. You are stuck with an enterprise tool marketed and suited for large studios but you thought you could make indie games faster than Unity.

My project is about 5% c++ base classes and GAS setup and 95% blueprint. I have no clue what you’re talking about with productivity tools but that sounds like nonsense. Unity doesn’t even have working networked multiplayer built into it last I checked.

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.

Unity is free until you ship.

so what is the game you shipped with it?

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