Why I don't use Unity, Godot or Unreal Engine - Which Game Engine I use?

I faced the productivity impact of Phaser (the docs are terrible and really old) and switched to KaboomJS (a newer alternative with simpler api) only to find that its performance is terrible on mobile. Now I am going back to phaser because I realize it's the best free option I have. And I am suffering but bearing with it.

Hot take: solo indie devs should always choose engines and don’t shy to utilise assets

You mention at the beginning of the video running on consoles, with a picture of a Switch, but according to Construct's website consoles aren't supported? (other than running in Edge browser on Xbox)
I was very tempted by Construct as a first-time ever game dev who hates coding, until I saw their pricing model combined with the inability to release on consoles, so ultimately settled on GM. But if there's some workaround you're aware of for releasing on consoles (specifically Switch) I'd love to hear it! That might change my mind although the pricing is still irksome.
GM just updated their licensing model and the free version has no engine limitations, so being able to work with it for free with the option to pay a pretty small cost later if you want to commercialize is very enticing, even if it is less beginner friendly.

Great video! New sub here! Really love the content so far. have already made more than 10 games in Construct 3, most of them published on Steam. This engine taught me how to make games in a professional, practical, and user-friendly manner, especially for someone who is an artist and not a programmer like myself. I recommend it if you have never made a game and are starting on this journey. However, in terms of publishing on consoles, which is where you can diversify your income, it is quite lacking. This reason led me to migrate to Unreal. If you're developing for mobile, web, and simple games for Steam, it's very worthwhile. But anything beyond that, you might have serious problems finding publishers or even a team to create games.

Godot does support C#, you can even code in C++ with it if you like.

Construct seemed pretty appealing to me, until I saw the pricing.

I made my Steam game in C3, but I am having some regrets. My game could sorely use Steam Workshop integration, and I just can't figure out how to get that implemented in C3.

Says Mindustry, Shows Factorio gameplay.

Thanks for the video. Nice to learn some new game frameworks and engines... I have to pick another one... I realy don't like JavaScript... don't know why, but every time I see some code I just think "this is ugly as h*ll" :D

godot is insane

You are not a masochist for enjoying coding, you are gifted!
Thank you Zizaco for sharing your wisdom, helping us all!
Shine on you crazy diamond !

In regards to Indie games that don't rely on eye candy, I don't have the game myself and I haven't played it, yet it does showcase a fairly large gaming community and that is Dwarf Fortress. I'm surprised you didn't mention this game in the list of games that you had mentioned.

Now personally I feel that sometimes it might be more advantageous to design and implement your own game engine. Sure I've heard the expression or sentiment "Why reinvent the wheel?" Yet we can take some advice from the pros of the 90s. Take ID Software for example when they produced DOOM. This game and it's internal in house game engine set or defined the standards of what a Game Engine is. Before this time, most games were built from the ground up with each and every new title. If you go back and listen to their interviews of why they choose to do this in house, it'll definitely give you a bit of perspective.

Now of course there are always pros and cons to either designing your own in house engine or using a 3rd Party vendor which I can demonstrate below:

Making Your Own In House Game Engine:
Pros:
- You have 100% control over the engine.
- You or your team knows the internal workings of the Engine right down to the source code and its implementation.
- You don't have to worry about any kind of licenses agreements and or fees.
- You can easily maintain, update and integrate your Engine versions to seamlessly work with any of your titles.
- You can implement only the features you need or want.
- It can be very self rewarding to accomplish such a task.
Cons:
- It does take more time, and personal expenses upfront, and effort to get your product out of the door.
- You are solely responsible for any and all kinds of bugs, crashes, updates, etc. to all of your applications that use your engine.
- You will have to consider your target audience along with what type of architecture and platform you intend your Game Engine / Game will support.
- Such as supporting various hardware, graphics cards and drivers, various CPUs as well as underlying operating systems.
- This is similar to point one but is more specific in that, depending on the size of your team, the cost or affordability to maintain a team becomes a factor
- as well as the workload and responsibility of each member of that team.

Using 3rd Party Engines:
Pros:
- They provide most of the features you are already looking for saving you a lot of time.
- They are typically couples with a developing IDE or GUI interface for ease of use.
- Most of the times, their functionality and features work right out of the box.
- It could be cheaper or more affordable in the long run.
- You don't have to worry about the underlying codebase, and you don't have implement a bunch of boilerplate code.
- They provide seamless integrations techniques.
- They are versatile in that they support a vast majority of:
- Architectures: Intel, AMD, and others.
- Platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux, and more,
- And Hardware/Renderers such as NVidia, Radeon, and more along with OpenGL, Vulkan and DirectX.
- Some of them also support integration to various programming languages and bindings where some are more specific.
- They are typically well maintained and constantly updated are they are usually still in development.
- There are a lot of resource materials available for people to learn how to use their technologies.
Cons:
- Many of them are coupled with either a licensing agreement and or internal fees which can vary by business model.
- You are at their mercy trusting that their engine will work provided as is... In other words, they are not always bug free
- where you or your team might have to figure out if it's an actual bug and submit support tickets to them...
- They may not always provide features that you are looking for.
- They may use or waste resources with features that you never intend to use.
- Some of their newer features and technology support would require you to have expensive hardware (Graphics Cards) in order to use them.
- You could have a bunch of active titles that your customers are still using where they decide to no longer support older versions of their engines.
- Upgrading your titles to use a newer version of their engines isn't always seamless and could break your existing titles.
- You are also bound to their work flow and their work environment via their IDEs - GUI development applications.
- It can take some time for your team to have to learn their technologies to become proficient at them.
- Now you have to have a legal team to handle the licenses agreements and contracts.

Why did I make this list and bring it up? Because at the end of the day, there is a No One Solution Fits All! There's always a choice and those choices are always bound with a set of tradeoffs! At the end of the day, it comes down to what you are trying to accomplish, which tools are better suited for the task or job at hand, and which route you are more willing to invest in. Just some food for thought!

The disadvantage with Construct is the fact that it relies on a browser JavaScript engine. And that it can't be exported to consoles. Both are kind of deal breakers imo. But it's nice if you just wanting create something small for fun.

Zizaco thanks for the video and the information :) ! I wanted to ask you what do you mean when you mention "your editor"?

thanks for sharing this! I'm working with TS on the web as well and now I'm trying to pick up Unity thinking C# seems nice and I could use that on the backend if I learn it; but I would definetly try this to play around with 2D web games

You made me reflect on some things. First, yeah it's expensive, but if it's making you save time on dev, especially while making a commercial product, maybe it actually saves you money then. And if I learn the language i'll actually be able to use it elsewhere, which is not the case with gd script or gml... it was a great video, thank you for sharing your journey and thoughts!

This was insightful for me coming from a web dev background and getting into games. You mentioned that you were spending a lot of time building your own editor while working with phaser, were you extending the phaser editor? What did you mean by this?

I used to use Construct 2. Nowadays I'm using Godot and Unity professionally. There are many people when they asked me what is the best way to learn how to program a game, I always told them to use Construct, most of the times they will roll their eyes.

I felt like people underestimate the power of Construct game engine, it's powerful enough. It's even better for beginner. Event sheet in Construct is basically real programming, except you had a logic brick you can work with and every time you pick a logic brick it will show you what other logic bricks are relevant.

Which means you don't have to learn any syntax and you will have a list of what you can do with certain things directly as you editing it, no need documentation. You just focus on making games and have fun. And you won't pull your hair out because how slow Unity is when making minor script modification.

I don't use Construct anymore since they do subscription now and not a cheap one. If not, I would probably use it along with Godot.
I wanted to buy Construct 2, but last time I checked they didn't sell them anymore. I wish I had purchased them back them.

Being able to code in your most proficient language to avoid context switching is a huge benefit. I stopped using unreal after 4+ years because the context switching was starting to wear on me. I found I was way more productive with godot because gdscript is so limited and it's so similar to python that the context switching cost is almost non-existant for me.

What packages do you find useful from npm? as a webdev I'm somewhat horrified by the prospect of pulling in npm packages for game projects. I worry a lot about packages being both inefficient, hard to understand, not fitting well with the problem space and having dependency management added to the already complex art of building games isn't something I'm keen to takeon.

I'm not sure how you can compare pretty low level low quality gaming tools to unity and unreal they are completely different use cases

SaaS? Summarily disqualified.

What does Construct charge?

Men why speed up your voice :(

I find it weird that you are referencing performance for a reason while you are suggesting typescript libraries, definately not the most performant

Have you tested three.js ? I just finished a game on Godot and i want to do another on a browser and i considering using it instead of Godot. Ill check for construct3

The notion that some scrappy little engine is going to run better than Unreal . . . just keep believin'

C# is amazing

Bro really called faxtorio mindustry 💀

Have you tried Defold game engine that looks quite promising

Engine pundits a galore. 😀

Rpgmaker?

I weirdly kind of miss darkbasic... I still have the disc somewhere.

Dark Basic!!! That takes me back.

Been programming for near 14 years now, Unity always kept me out of game dev, then I found pygame during the unity controversy and realized I'm living this video. Keep up the good work!

What about Phaser Editor? I was planning to look into it because some quick prototyping is what I'm currently missing in Phaser.

I have created my own engine, and like you, I managed to win an innovation award against games with a huge budget and created in Unity or Unreal among others.

honestly, pretty nice vid

"Think about games like [...] Mindustry [proceeds to show a still of Factorio]".

Listen here you cheeky bastard...

I am also a FE dev and I was happy to see that I can use TS and NPM with Construct! But then I took a look at the pricing (way too expensive) :( I was hoping for an Unreal type of business model, but I could try the free version anyway.

I wrote my own engine in a couple weeks.

I made my first (and so far only) released game in Construct 3. I started to lean away from it because of the feeling of my projects being held hostage by its subscription (which recently went up in price). I still love it and consider it the easiest engine of them all (as someone who dislikes traditional scripting and has given up on learning any programming languages) but I'm looking into other tools for the time being. But honestly, I feel like there's a 20-50% chance I'll just give in and stick with Construct though--I'd rather just keep paying them than keep wasting time trying to learn a new tool at this point in my life.

I was excited until I saw the price. For a hobbyist, Godot is the way to go.

It brought tears of joy when you mentioned DarkBasic and Blitz3D ♥ we're so alike :)

My experience with GameMaker's GML has been smooth, and the coding isn't that much different from what you would expect from a simplified version of C or C++. Which is also pretty similar to what JavaScript has to offer, now that I think about it lol
I really like the C-family, but at the same time, I never liked C# for some reason (maybe because it's similar to Java with the OOP approach). That's why GML hits close to home. I can use my beloved C-family without having to deal with memory allocation or mandatory OOP. It's a super quick language to learn exactly because it's a mish-mash of other languages, especially JavaScript.
The only pain is having to paid subscription plans to create the executable for some target platforms (such as HTML5 or Android). But at the same time, I looked up Construct3 real quick here, and looks like you also need to pay an annual subscription, aww man... And it's much more expensive than GameMaker's :(

Got me interested, but it seems Construct requires a monthly/annual subscription?

Very inspiring story sir! I really like your approach, how you seem to see game engines / frameworks as tools and just try to find the one most fitting your particular needs. Lately I tried to learn Godot but your content made me realize I just follow the "hype" and didn't think about what I wanted to accomplish, what my strong points are and what tools are best suited for my personnal use. Thanks a lot for making me realize that! I'll be sure to follow you from now on, seems like I can learn a lot by doing so. Good speed sir!

And here I jumped from Construct to Phaser...

as @TanTan says: Bevy Bevy Bevy Bevy Bevy Bevy Bevy Bevy Bevy Bevy Bevy Bevy.