I’ve been thinking hard on dumping Unity for a while, especially as more and more of their shitty partnerships with the US military and military contractors has come to light. It’s not like I ever really liked it, it was just a means to easily port stuff to multiple platforms, so dumping it is more about finding something that I can work well with, and that has at least the possibility of cross platform.
I’m confident enough to participate here, since IC has been pretty safe-feeling, but I usually avoid these conversations because they typically summon a crowd of know-it-all gamedev dudebros from nowhere to scream at me about how foolish I’m being for not choosing to use X, where X is usually either writing my own engine from scratch or whatever platform I’m saying I don’t want to use.
Anyway, I mostly make 2D games, so Unreal is probably not going to work for me (although I do see it’s possible to do 2D with it, of course), but it feels appealing for the same reason Unity does, it’s relatively approachable and easy portable to various platforms, so maybe I’ll check out how janky 2D is for it. Still, it feels like a 10 ton solution to a 5 pound problem.
I considered Godot a while back, but a friend who’s worked with it told me their position on console ports is ‘work with a porting company’, which is not fantastic. This same friend suggested I get in on the beta for the Luxe engine, which sounds almost too good to be true! They also said they were actively looking for folks to work with the beta, but applied in January and heard nothing back.
Likewise, GameMaker Studio is super popular (almost everyone in the gamedev community I was part of in Portland used it), but I also seem to remember it’s something of a challenge to port things to console with it.