Unity

Unity has a long history of being a great engine for Indie Developers. The last year or two has had a bit of a shift, but the engine itself is still a good starting place for game dev. The company does seem to have taken the feedback over the last year to heart and hopefully will continue improving over the course of the Unity 6 release.

It uses C# as a programming language, which is a good language to start with as its relatively easy to understand. Unity also has Visual Scripting as well if that is your preferred method.

Advantages of Unity

Easy to Get Started

Unity is a very easy platform to get started on as the Engine itself is relatively intuitive and adding assets in comparison to others. You can drag and drop assets into a project, then simple saving over the asset from your external application (such as Blender or Photoshop) will update it in game.

Resources

As Unity has been around for so long there are plenty of resources available to you as a creator. There are countless tutorials online such as their own documentation, but also courses and YouTube channels dedicated to creating experiences with Unity.

Asset Store

The Unity Asset Store offers a ton of assets that can help get your started on your game from simple assets through to whole game experiences you can tweak. As the store has relatively regular sales you can get many of these assets at a bargain too.

Disadvantages of Unity

Render Pipelines

It can be a little difficult to make sure they you are learning the right part of Unity as they have split the engine into three render pipelines : Standard or Built In (SRP), Universal (URP), and High Definition Render Pipelines (HDRP).

Built-in is a carry over from their original pipeline.

Universal is their lightweight engine designed for Mobile, standalone VR, or lower end devices.

High Definition Render Pipeline is their high end pipeline designed for high end desktops. This has all the bells and whistles such as Ray tracing etc.

Some aspects of one pipeline might be compatible with other pipelines, whereas some things are not. This makes finding resources/documentation on the pipeline you are using a little troublesome.

NB : The 2024 Unite Keynote implied that the split render pipelines will be merged back into one for Unity 7. This is great news as long as that process is done well. The keynote also mentioned that the version updates will follow a more standard approach, hopefully reducing the countless elements of the Engine being in pre-release, beta, deprecated, etc. that it has had over the last few years.

Less Trustworthy

Over the last few years Unity has dropped the ball a couple of times in a number of categories such as updates, stability and monetization.

Their updated approach to Monetization in 2023 was also poorly received implying that experiences made on older Unity versions would also require a new (and ridiculous) payment system called a Runtime Fee. They have completely rolled this back, but the fact that this was even considered was a bit of a blow to many creators resulting in many leaving for Godot or Unreal.

As noted, it looks like Unity has listened to the feedback, but they have a ways to go before they earn their Creators trust back. Unity 6 will most likely be the trial for this.

Multiplayer Costs

Unity Netcode is still relatively new (as of late 2024) but seems to be a good approach to multiplayer with many of the basics covered with easy to use templates. This was one of the many updates that was well received in late 2024 Keynote. It has relatively complicated pricing, but as most multiplayer services have similar approaches it is comparable.

Other platforms are available that have been around for some time such as Photon Fusion (Paid) and Mirror (free potentially).