AI For Games: Week 1

Looking at Game Engines

This week I have been looking at Game Engines and frameworks. I’d prefer to use something I’m somewhat familiar with, so I’ll be looking at engines I’ve already used.

Unity

I’m fairly familiar with unity, I have made some tiny experiments and followed a few tutorials but ultimately made nothing of significance.

Pros

• Widely used
• Well documented
• Huge community
• Asset store

Cons

• Not much personal experiance
• More personal experiance with similar engines
• Vague sense of dislike (it just weirds me out a bit)

Godot

I’m really familiar with Godot 2.0, small tweaks have been made since then, but overall I’m more familiar with it than I am Unity.

Pros

• Open Source & Community Funded (not at all relavent but hey it’s nice)
• Intuitive project structure and inheratance system
• I’m familiar with it

Cons

• Smallish community, but friendly and helpful
• Lack of tutorials (Still a lot though)
• Documentation can be frustrating at times

SFML

SFML I’ve done a lot of work with, but it’s more of a framework than an engine. It’ll take a very long and difficult time to make anything meaningful

Pros

• I’m familiar with SFML
• Complete software and hardware control
• Lower level programming than the average game engine

Cons

• I have to mess with advanced game architecture
• I’ll spend more time structuring code than developing the game
• Incapable of 3D

Conclusion

I’ll use godot, it’s capable of 3D and I’m familiar with it. Unity I haven’t touched much and SFML is far too time consuming to make anything meaningful, by using Godot I can quickly create a game, allowing me to focus on the most important aspects of the game instead of messing with rendering and advanced architecture. I think me being familiar with it is the biggest thing Godot has going for it, otherwise I’d use Unity.