Unreal Engine

The quality of the graphics and visual engines are the best available and one of the key reasons why it was selected - the photorealism, lighting effects, and Chaos physics engine are top notch. The blueprinting system for creating prototypes without needing to code has proven very helpful, as we have been able to develop concepts for review using the drag-and-drop visual scripting capabilities. The self-contained, all-in-one product model has reduced the need for third-party tools, as our developers have been able to use the animation tools, particle effects, cinematics, and other features out-of-the-box as part of the overall product offering.

Nanite and Lumen are absolute game-changers for us. Nanite lets us use film-quality assets without worrying about poly counts or manual LODs, and Lumen gives us our world the dynamic iighting and realistic reflections essential for setting the atmosphere in Jacob Wilhelm. These features bring the cinematic, gritty tone of the thriller genre to life with minimal performance tweaking. While we're familiar with programming, the Blueprint system has drastically sped up our development process. It lets us test mechanics like investigation sequences, inventory systems, and interactive dialogue trees without getting bogged down in boilerplate code. It's also great for dividing work among the team based on skill level. Being able to blend our custom characters with high-quality environment assets from the Unreal Marketplace saves us time and keeps the project moving forward. We've been able to prototype entire areas of the map using marketplace content, then gradually replace or refine them with our own designs. It strikes a great balance between speed and customization.

A few things I like about the product are the blueprints, visuals, and assets. Unreal Engine is great for hobbyists because blueprints make it easy to build without coding, the engine provides amazing visuals with little to no setup required, and there are many free assets and built-in tools to help users create whatever they'd like.

The complexity of the product is high, with a steep learning curve and longer time required for mastery of all of the components and capabilities (especially those that require C code development). The visual fidelity required very powerful PCs to run the software smoothly, which then required additional investment in physical compute infrastructure. Compared to other offerings, the projects are large, resource-intensive, and have a level of complexity that may not be needed for some of our simpler projects.

Unreal Engine 5 is incredibly powerful, but that power comes at a cost. It's quite heavy on system resources, especially when using features like Nanite and Lumen. Our team members sometimes struggle with slower workflows due to their system resources, and testing open-world scenes with dynamic lighting can really strain performance. While blueprints are beginner-friendly, diving into more comlpex systems like optimization for large worlds, world partition, shader graph customization, or animation blueprints can be overwhelming. The documentation is helpful, but some topics still require deep community digging or third party tutorials to full grasp given the fact that we transitioned from a different Game engine. Since we're building Jacob Wilhelm with many of the newer features (like world partitioning for the open world), we've run into occasional bugs, crashes or unpredictable behavior. These aren't necessarily dealbreakers, but they can interrupt the development flow and require time to troubleshoot, especially when using experimental or less mature plugins.

Unreal Engine can be frustrating for hobbyists due to the high system resource usage, has a learning curve with a lot of menus and systems you can easily get lost in, and overall complexity that is more suited for in depth usage rather than hobby usage.