Why Did I Decide to Make My 2D Persona Inspired Game with Unreal Engine? Was I Right in the Head?



Let's face it: there are several game engines out there and choosing the right one can be tricky. Until a couple of years ago, I was juggling between Unreal Engine and Unity. Despite most of my friends who have worked in AAA games suggesting I go with Unreal, I always thought Unity had the most appeal because it was advertised for indie game developers. Then Unity messed up their pricing, and everyone suddenly started switching to Godot and Unreal Engine. Not many professionals changed though, and I’ll get into it below, but most hobby indie developers, especially YouTubers, saw this as a threat to the gaming community, and rightfully so.

When this Unity mess happened, the decision was clear to me as to what game engine I should start learning: Unreal Engine. The game I'm making right now is a 2D JRPG inspired by Persona and The World Ends with You, but at some point in the future, I imagine I will switch to making 2.5D and 3D games. To be fair, Unreal Engine has a clear advantage when it comes to 2.5D and 3D games. More or less, Parallel Pulse is like a hallway for me to transition to full 3D games. It's not because I don't like 2D games—quite the opposite, 2D games hold a lot of appeal to me—but at some point, I want to make 3D games to better express the experience for some games I want to develop.

Some of you might say that Unity or Godot can do pretty much what Unreal can, but at the end of the day, I've seen firsthand that Unreal Engine’s physics can't be compared. It saves you a ton of time and headaches. Blueprints allow you to create games quickly, and there's no shortage of resources and tutorials on how to implement pretty much anything in 3D. Unfortunately, most online tutorials I've watched usually scratch the surface as to which engine you should use. If you are a hobby developer and you're planning on developing simple games, pretty much any game engine will do the work. But if you want to be a full-time game developer making your own games, then the choice becomes more obvious.

This means you want to have your game in front of as many people as possible. As we all know, PC gaming comes last after console gaming and mobile gaming. Since console gaming is nearly twice as big as PC gaming and gives you the ability to bring your game in front of most gamers, it's a no-brainer that the game engine you use needs to have all the tools to export your game for consoles. This means that game engines like Godot are automatically excluded for me. Don't get me wrong; I really like the engine and played a bit with it, and it's insane that you can pretty much code an entire game using your tablet, but it's important to me that the game engine has native capabilities to export to consoles. If that wasn't the case, then probably Godot would be my preferred choice for 2d games. I understand that several of you might think that you can find a company that can port your game for $10K or you can buy the tools needed, but let's be realistic here. Most of us don't have that amount of money to port the game in the first place. With GameMaker, Unity, and obviously Unreal Engine, things are fairly simple. Yes, you need devkits and access to the developer’s SDK, but it’s not that expensive.

What makes Unreal Engine even more attractive for game development in general is their pricing model: after you get $1M gross revenue from your game, you have to pay the engine 5%. For most indies, we’ll never surpass that amount of money, so essentially you're using the engine for free. Unity’s price model is ok now, but they've proven you can't trust them, so in my case, Unreal Engine was the obvious solution.
This doesn't mean that Unreal Engine is the best for everyone—every person has their own preferences and reasons. In my case, I chose Unreal because of where I think my audience exists: in consoles. For example, if I wanted to make a mobile game, then Unity would be a no-brainer because they have the best support for mobile games. It's obvious that Unity doesn’t care much about PC and console games since the majority of their profit comes from mobile gaming, and thus Unity’s price model is focused on mobile games.

Does this mean that I will stop making games in other engines? For my personal, commercial projects, it’s highly likely I’ll be mostly using Unreal Engline, but for everything else, Ren'Py will always be my first choice. As you might have seen, I primarily make narrative-heavy games, and that engine is built specifically for it. You can create narrative-heavy games insanely fast, and believe it or not, I wouldn't change it for any other game engine if it wasn’t for console porting. 
I hope I gave you some insight into why I made this decision. If you are thinking of following a professional game development path, then console porting will probably be part of your business strategy, and you might want to consider which engine works best for your needs.

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