Saw some of your shots from last week as well. I'm really digging on the atmosphere. I was curious as to if you had experience in Unity as well, as I'd love to hear people's thoughts on Unreal 4 in comparison.
I do have some Unity experience, but I'm probably not the best person to ask. I've mostly used the Free/Indie version to make
Cubrick - I only tried Pro for a month to experiment with the Oculus Rift. My 2 cents:
- Unreal Blueprints are a game-changer! They have completely swayed me away from Unity. If you haven't seen this system in action, take a look at Epic's videos:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZlv_N0_O1gaG5BW72It4chjhypxIO9ZB- Unreal enables vastly more impressive visuals out of the box versus Unity Free, and while Unity Pro nearly evens the score here, its price is out of my reach.
- Coding in Unity is much easy to get started in: I have roughly equal (very little) experience in C++ or C#, but I was able to get results very quickly in C# in Unity, while I'm still confounded by the more cryptic syntax of both C++ as a language (pointers etc), as well as Unreal's API conventions. But as the Unreal Engine API docs are fleshed out in the coming months (that's on Epic's roadmap), and more people share their own resources and experience, this should ease the learning curve.
- Deployment to a final, finished executable with Unity (I was targeting Web, Android, Windows, and Linux in my Unity project) is significantly faster and results in a seemingly much smaller final product. I haven't spent much time stripping my Unreal project down the bare minimum for distribution, but it looks like even my currently rather minimal Unreal project will be a several hundred megabyte download, versus 10 or less for a minimal Unity project. Again, I'm not an expert, and I'm probably missing ways to optimize this in Unreal, but for the average newcomer, this could be a stumbling block if you plan to distribute builds on your own (versus using Steam, itch.io, etc).
Long story short: scrape together $19, download the engine, download some of the free example projects from the marketplace, and watch Epic's videos. You'll be up to speed quickly enough that you should be able to judge for yourself if it's the right fit for you, and worst case you're out the cost of dinner and few hours of your time. Good luck!
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