I felt like people around me thought I was crazy for switching platforms to start a new project. I already knew one, why kill a lot of time learning another? I had reasoned through the decision, but to be honest, I did not know just how good of a choice UE4 was at at the time.
From top to bottom, I found UE4 to meet more professional expectations and I could see better engineering decisions behind it. I was very skeptical of Blueprints and went in thinking “I’m a programmer; I don’t need any wimpy visual programming language.” Quickly, I realized that for prototyping purposes BPs really made a lot of sense and as I became more familiar with them, I found them to be extremely well designed, implemented, and extensible with C++. That was my experience with UE4 overall: learning each new system and being very impressed with both the UX and solid engineering.
Over the years I’ve found Unity to be a little ramshackle and I’ve been frustrated now and then that I need to build certain solutions myself, that Unity doesn’t offer a solution or that what is available by default or on the asset store doesn’t cut it in some way. My experience with UE4 has been just the opposite. I can see the results of years of work put in by many teams of very smart engineers and some excellent collaboration with designers to make sure my development experience is positive and my results are of the highest quality.
In fact, if I could put my feelings about UE4 in a word, I would say just that: quality. I get the sense that at every turn quality was emphasized. I respect that and I’m more than happy to reap the benefits from it.
I’m actually, starting a new job working in UE4 next week. I only dived in for a personal project, but by now it seems like it’s blowing up industry wide, sucking in a lot of talent that was previously dedicated to Unity. My expectation is that UE5 and Metahumans will be major game-changers and having gotten in early will have its benefits.
Thanks for the warm welcome!
