A Quick Game and Some Thoughts of UE4 vs Unity
Having worked with Unreal Engine 3, moving on to UE4 was surprisingly confusing initially. The interface has changed quite a lot for one and Kismet is now the super-comprehensive Blueprints which took a bit of time to work out where the files are found. Also, C++ is awesome.
The biggest changes for me was how matinee worked and how there is a Level Blueprint as well as object-based blueprints that you can access through various links on the interface. Matinee is now accessed through actors in the scene instead of being a function within blueprints that you attach actors to.
Here’s a quick minigame I made in about 3 days including learning the in-and-outs of the engine.
I wanted to create something that looked polished with very minimal art and with just visual scripting. The gameplay is very much inspired by the Point Blank games from 90s arcades but I wanted something a little more modern so I opted for a TRON-esque feel. I think the end result reminds me a lot of those laser shooter games at the arcades where you stand at a stall to try to win a prize. I’d love to try this on a VR device but I haven’t got a test unit unfortunately.
The best thing about UE4 is that it comes with so many templates you can start out with. For this, I started with a First-Person template that had most of the controls set up. I had to readjust the cameras and restrict the view angles. I think I could have optimized a lot of the matinee action used for the target boards but there’s so much variations to how I wanted the boards to flip and move that it doesn’t make it worthwhile to create custom actions.
Creating the UI is a lot simpler than I remembered about UE3. The main trouble I had was in halting the start of the game until ‘Start’ was pressed and again all of this can be done relatively easily with the visual scripting editor.
Since this experiment, I’ve played around a bit more with the various features of the engine and I actually like it much better than Unity for prototyping. To get to a relatively-polished prototype is so much easier only because of visual scripting. Also, one of the pluses for UE4 is that I can launch my game to my iPhone with a Windows PC directly from the editor. The workflow is pretty much like this:
Unity
- Download Unity remote
- Stream your build at a significantly worse resolution to your iPhone to test.
- Once you disconnect, you lose the game.
UE4
- Launch to device
- Wait and then you’ll have the build on your iPhone at a pretty decent resolution.
- Play it even offline.
In closing, I think there’s a lot of good points about UE4. I’ve read though that there are very strange bugs that would pop up in mobile builds that you can’t do anything about for now. In general, I’d say Unity seems better suited for mobile platforms since, at the very least there is a lot of support for various mobile-specific features but otherwise, I’d much prefer Unreal for its workflow. I’m really particularly impressed by how much can be achieved with a much leaner learning curve in Unreal.
