Team Arguments

They're just tools man, it's like comparing Maya with Max. Whatever you're most comfortable with, go ahead and make awesome things with it. Arguing which one is best is futile because it's so relative.

It's all just fuckin tris in the end.

Agreed with HP, its all relative.

However I would say that generally people find Unity more user friendly. More to the point if you are all relatively inexperienced it generally works out better if you pick an engine that the programmers feel more comfortable with. Art pipeline is a lot easier to learn and experiment with.

Triangles. Like HP said it doesn't really matter. Though looking at the programmers concern it's probably that there's no source code for UDK which I'm assuming unity has? Arguing about which has better snapping is kind of ridiculous though...

The LD should probably just deal with it. These aren't things you're going to have much choice of in reality so may as well just learn the pipeline for Unity.

Agreed. I think in the long term youll find a lot less roadblocks if you go the Unity route. If it makes you feel any better I worked in a very well funded Indie studio that argued about exactly the same thing for about 2 months, it was ridiculous, but its far from uncommon.

It's not a yes or no question. You can if the rooms are really simple, it's hard to say without knowing what you're targeting. Either way it probably shouldn't be a deciding factor in 'which engine should we use'

Hey I'm the LD, and just wanted to clear somethings up. The only reason why I brought up snapping was that in unity there is an asset called Pro Grids (free version, also I didn't like the default one), and it locks your snapping to a .25. Personally I found this highly annoying when trying to create some things. Now for why I wanted to switch to UDK was that most of us will be going to an art school that does 3D modeling. level design, and animation etc. I found out that the school uses UDK. So I gave UDK a try and I instally fell in love with it after messing with it for a while. I think the main reason was because it felt similar to SDK's Hammer and everything felt so natural to create stuff.

Then fall in love with Unity. It sounds like an asshole thing to say but there's no harm in being comfortable with multiple toolsets.

^ This. If you want to work in the games industry you'll want to become familiar with as many different toolsets as possible. Trust me it will help you immensely when job hunting.

Like others have said, the engine doesn't matter that much. Both Unity and Unreal have their pros and cons. It's almost safe to say that Unity is a thousand times more user friendly. In the end, that doesn't matter as well if you guys feel comfortable when playing with Unreal.

I myself am a lot more experienced with Unity, but I don't think that not being an expert with Unreal would be a disadvantage for my curriculum, because tools are just tools. What really matters is what you can create with them. Game dev studios often have their own specific engines (sometimes a heavily modified version of an existing engine).

I believe that when Phoenixx157 said that he could model in Unreal but not in Unity, he was talking about using BSP (or whatever is called that technique to modify geometries in Hammer)... right? Well, there are some plugins that enable the same feature in Unity. One of them is ProBuilder, developed by the same guys that created the ProGrids. One of the devs is a member of Mapcore (sixbyseven). I've been using ProBuilder extensively during the last three days (50 hours~) and it's very easy to use. It has some bugs, but it gets the job done.

tl;dr: I'd choose Unity because that's what the programmer is more comfortable with (C#) and the modelling could be done in Max, Maya, Blender etc.

i recognize this discussion. it's not one i've had with anyone, but it's definitely one i've had in my head lining out the pros and cons. i've used both engines professionally. i'll flat out say that scripting in unity may be the best thing ever, provided you don't need someone to hold your hand (as in kismet). it gets better as creating new editor features are as easy as knowing C#. UDK has a built in FBX export which can export for unity. it's not the most optional, especially for prototyping 3d spaces fast, but it works. probuilder is a great alternative at the very least for blocking out and playtesting fast. at best one can really do some cool stuff with it.

UDK isn't bad either, but speaking from a professional UE3 perspective, it might be going overboard for a smaller game. UDK literally has the power to do everything, but in this it becomes very feature creepy and may be too hard to manage for a smaller team. i don't know how it is with UE4, all i have heard is that they've made it easier. this may shed some light: http://www.unrealengine.com/udk/

finally, sort of echoing everyone else: focus on the game, focus on the gameplay, focus on the driving power of the game. you might start with unity then find out through prototyping that UDK is the better alternative. once you know what you're really going to make the game about and the scope of it, the choice will seem more obvious

Quote from Kirizai

2: UDK has snapping

2: Better snapping

1: Hold ctrl+shift in unity

1: Move

I just have to mention a really good script for snapping in unity. Put the attached script anywhere in your unity project folder and open your scene. Then press "Ctrl + L" this will open a menu for auto-grid snapping, in this window you can set to how many units you want your translated object to snap to.

If you would point-snap something it would move there as always but right after it would snap to the grid again. Try it out!

AutoSnap.zip

Ask your programmer which he'd prefer to use. You'll save yourself a lot of trouble down the line. Your level designer should deal with it and be able to design with either really, it'll massively benefit him to know both tools anyway. Unity can also do basic geometry and you can do some nice prototyping (BSP) if you buy probuilder (which is awesome).

I'd recommend Unity for a small team, I've been using it and love it more and more every day. Unity also has some great add ons you can buy that'll save you a ton of time.

Unless you're only using really simple geometry for your game, you'll want to do your modelling in a 3D package like Max or Maya.