What engine would most suit a RPG game that’s 2.5D isometric view, is kind to new developers and has a whole load of reference material so I can teach myself as I go?
I only have experience with Godot, but from that I can say its documentation is really good and has helped me so far to teach myself important stuff (am really new to game dev, but had some programming experience), and I do know it has support for isometric tilesets.
Unity, I have no experience with, but I guess it's overall more mature from being in use so much. It does come with some issues, see the scandal around their planned profit sharing policies a while back, which Godot circumvents by being free software.
AFAIK, yes, they pulled it back after the backlash - it just highlights that you will always be dependent on their decisions in the end. But overall - go with what feels better for you.
They did, but also they showed that they can never be trusted again.
If you're starting from scratch, Godot is a much more sensible choice—any unity studio with the ability to do so, will be dropping it as soon as they can
Edit: also gotta add if you have no coding experience whatsoever, you're probably best addressing that first. If you can't build a simple application, you will probably not succeed in building a game.
Unreal is heavy, and while you can make games without any coding knowledge, it's more for super fancy 3D games.
Unity and Godot are a bit simpler and more casual. Unity is ripe with issues and Godot is a little more immature. I would recommend Godot if you care about open source/community vibes, or Unity if you want more powerful features.
I wish there were better 2D or 2.5D dedicated engines, since imo most games don't require 3D to be cool, but I don't personally know any good ones (RIP Flash)
Thanks for the suggestions. I was initially looking at RPG Maker but when I saw that it can't really handle isometric views I was a bit put off it. Well, that and the price of it....
GameMaker is a pretty good 2D game engine. I used it up until Yoyo Games pushed me out by making it prohibitively expensive with the release of Studio - but from what I hear, they've recently reversed course on their pricing in a good way.
I originally learned how to write code using the (very easy to learn) drag and drop editor in GameMaker 6, and I'm now a professional software developer, so I guess it holds a special place in my heart, haha.
I have zero trust in Unity given recent events. In this case, I'd recommend Godot, unless OP is trying to build something that's intended for a large-scale/mass release.
Oh shit. I saw this on something not too long ago... I think it was in Civie11's last round up. He didn't show a lot or say the name, but it looked interesting.
I want to say that I wish I could've read this 25 years ago, but really, I wasn't ready to take it to heart back then. In fact, even though I've had a couple of minor successes with free games that I deliberately didn't get too attached to, I still have extreme difficulty just sitting down and making something--anything--rather than falling into a death spiral of over-thinking and grandiose designs. I might have to re-read this a few times to make it sink in.
I don't agree with people downvoting you just cause its unity lmfao, but yeah im just sticking with godot, theyre advancing pretty fast and you can immediately tell the features are implemented with game dev in mind... where unity feels more like a cheaper version of unreal's "everything" engine.
Sort of. If you earned >$1 million in revenues in the past 12 months, you have two options:
Pay 2.5% of your monthly revenue
Pay a runtime fee based on your monthly downloads
So basically, they made it optional, but you still have to pay 2.5% which is still significant. Otherwise you can use the runtime fee and report data yourself (it will probably be cheaper)
Not a chance. I've been using Unreal for a few years now, and as soon as Godot has the features I need I'll go back to it. The company behind Unity has shown they don't care about their engine, just the money they can extract from it. And who's to say they don't change their terms at some future time when things have quieted down, and the dust has settled, to retroactively introduce this run-time fee back into the mix for older versions as well.
That's only a short-term solution. That LTS only lasts so long, and both Apple and Google now require that you recompile your app with the latest APIs every 2 years or less.
Game Development
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.