Is Unreal Engine way to go?

That’s the question the I am hoping to answer soon. For past 4 years I’ve been working on a multiplayer RPG game together with a friend of mine. It is written entirely from scratch with JavaScript language. Unfortunately it is also a really ambitious project for two people working on it in their spare time while having minimal experience with developing games.

You might be thinking that we are really silly trying to use such immature language for something that big. To be honest, I might agree with you. It was some sort of dream that we will make breakthrough and show the world it’s possible to do something like that … but that would certainly require much more effort and experience.

A month ago I got kinda annoyed of this never ending challenge. We were standing at the point realizing that what we have made so far does not scale as well as we need. I have created the Scent library/framework roughly 3 years ago when I had far less experience than I have today. It’s not a bad concept in general, but it’s too tight for our current needs.

Anyway based on this annoyance I’ve decided to check once again if there isn’t some existing solution that we could use to make it easier for us. Sadly in JavaScript land nobody has such ambitious dreams as we have. You want to make glorious website? Yea sure, pick one from hundreds of different frameworks. With a game? Unless you want to make 2D platformer or clone of the Minecraft, there is virtually nothing to use.

At the very beginning of the project we were deciding to use the Unity as it was becoming very popular back then, but the price tag was too high for us at that time. Especially since we had no idea what we are capable of.

Then I have stumbled upon the Unreal Engine. I heard some stories before speaking about this robust tool to be entirely free to use. What was my surprise when I was able to confirm that.

To be more precise, it’s free to develop and publish game, but for every quarter of the year when the game makes $3000 gross profit, they would get 5% revenue. That’s really a distant dream for us to make such money with a game, so why the hell not. And if we really succeed that much, then we are more than happy to pay to the Epic Games (company behind UE) for the tool that made it possible.

I’ve spent like 14 days examining Unreal Engine capabilities in depth. Got really carried away because simply said, they already have features we have been developing for last 4 years plus another bunch we wouldn’t ever dream of in JavaScript for couple more years.

Sadly soon came also a realization that creating a persistent multiplayer world is not possible with such robust tool either. At least not without diving into C++ coding and making it by ourselves. There are some paid plugins that could make it easier, but not the exact solution we are looking for.

We have talked a lot about it and in end we have actually decided to postpone our multiplayer dream as it’s too complex for our situation. Instead we have started working on something less ambitious and more of a single player like. It’s not a completely different game, it’s more like a prequel to our main game. I may write more about it in some future posts.

Now back to the original question: Is Unreal Engine way to go? We are still not 100% sure, but it has definitely improved our general mood and motivation about development and gave as a new hope. In last week we have already managed to create mechanics that would take at least a month doing it with JavaScript.