Now, for my serious comment: RPG Maker and byond both have their places. Both can be used to tell delightful stories. I do emphasize the concept story. I am ignorant of Byond but at first blush it reminds me of other independent engines from yester-years like Adventure Game Maker or a similar product I saw advertised around D&D dedicated sites. You have little to no control over the mechanics of your game. All RPG Maker games are the same RPG Maker game, just with a different imagination driving it. Despite what was commented somewhere above there is, in fact, a ton of online support for RPG Maker and it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to get under the hood and make things feel a bit more “homey”.
Unity and its comparable rival Unreal open up all of the doors for a cost in difficulty. If you have a vision with a “never seen that before” feature (or even an “I wish more games did this”) than you will not be happy with these more user-friendly products.
Here is a solid point about Unity. It isn’t perfect. The past five or six years have been tumultuous. I would like to point out the new UEA allows for a million dollars US in gross sales, measured over 12 months, before they hit you with license fees. I cannot stress enough to each and every one who has a dream of selling a game on Steam (or anywhere) read all of that boring crap Ahead Of Time. You do not want to get a nasty surprise in contract stipulation when you are 75% finished developing.
Unity vs. Unreal? Another important but unasked for question. All coding is difficult. If it wasn’t GameDev.tv would not exist. Of the two, Unreal is clearly more powerful, and expensive. The margin between the two companies isn’t as pronounced as, say, Sony vs. Nintendo but one can see a clear demarcation. I chose Unity because for my use case as a solo, hobby-time developer it has all that I need and then some. Heaps of support… Unfortunately, heaps of gatekeepers and trolls. That is the same for everything these days, really. I will say this. C# inside UnityEngine is about as close to easy as you can get with serious programming. The MonoBehaviour class is just short of a miracle. Considering even that, I am still often stumped. If you are really struggling now with C# for Unity than you are going to get outright homicidal after a couple of weeks with Unreal. There are so many unique ways to break pretty things in C++.
In the end I say Unity. The learning curve is alarming for those who enter naive, but you have so much more agency over all aspects of the internet crashing sleeper hit you are working on. Plus, my current financial investment in my Unity project is less than $400. It is a big enough undertaking that $400 should make skeptics balk. With some Googlejitsu and persistence I have filled all of my visual asset needs with Blender and Gimp refurbishments of discards from The Island of Misfit Assets. Plus, there are digital yard sales every other minute for Unity toys. Unity did do a really big nasty not only a year and a half ago and were spanked soundly by developers across the world. That is a point of concern for many. I am not personally fazed, because all businesses exist only to make money. They tried to pull a fast one and got caught. So many others don’t get caught. Looking at you EA.
Anyway, that is what I think.
