What is the best game engine for an indie game developer?

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Choosing the right game engine is crucial when it comes to developing your own game, especially as a solo or indie developer. Each decision you make has a critical effect on the long-term choices available to you and the final outcome.

The game engine will not only determine what features are possible but will also impact you financially. Unity's change in their runtime fee going forward in 2024 is a great example of that.

In this article, I will go over the most relevant and useful game engines that you should consider.

01. Unity

Unity is undoubtedly one of the most popular and widely-used game engines in the industry.

It supports both 2D and 3D games across PC, consoles, mobile, and VR. Unity offers a user-friendly interface, a solid set of tools, and a vast library of assets and plugins.

A big advantage of Unity is the sheer number of developers, indie and corporate alike, who have been using it for years. Put your problem into a search and you are almost guaranteed to find someone on Stack Overflow or a blog who has already solved it.

Unity's documentation is pretty good but it could be a lot better.

02. Unreal Engine

Unreal is a great choice. Developed by Epic Games, it's the engine of choice for mid-sized studios and AAA development, but don't let that fool you. It's just as good an option for an indie game developer or solo dev.

Tim Sweeny (The CEO of Epic) and his antics aside; Unreal is a solid choice. Unfortunately its not as good as Unity in terms of the sheer number of resources when searching the internet for random problems that you will have when developing your game.

What Unreal has that Unity doesn't is Blueprints. It is by far Unreal's standout feature for indie and solo developers. If you're happy using a visual node interface instead of writing code, making a full game with Unreal's Blueprint system is genuinely great.

The Blueprint system in Unreal gets an unfair reputation, mostly from programmers who do not want to touch UI/GUI interfaces in favor of just writing their own code. I must admit I am one of these individuals.

Cross-platform support, in-app purchases, and Android/iOS features are all present in both Unreal and Unity. You cannot go wrong choosing either one.

03. Godot

Are you broke? Have zero trust in companies changing their terms without warning?

Well fear not. Godot has filled the spot cocos2d used to fill and established itself as the go-to open-source game engine for indie developers and solo developers.

Godot does have its own scripting language which I am told is pretty good once you get used to it. The learning curve is not too steep.

One of the standout features of Godot is that it's easy to use, even more so than Unity. The design is intuitive and you can get a Flappy Bird clone running within an hour with little to no game dev experience.

The open-source nature of Godot gives me mixed feelings personally. I've worked for corporations and seen hundreds of game engines come and go. I don't see "open source" as the hail mary quality others treat it as.

Choosing Godot is not bad at all. If it's your first game, I'm happy to recommend it over Unreal. Your biggest hurdle as a solo dev is finishing your game in the first place, not your choice of engine.

An honourable mention, GameMaker Studio 2

GameMaker Studio 2, developed by YoYo Games, is a popular choice for developers who want to create 2D games without diving into complex programming.

The popularity of GameMaker Studio 2 is not unjustified, even for experienced developers. I've used it a lot for prototyping projects we later implemented in Unreal or Unity.

Gamemaker just work and when you are iterating through ideas that is exactly what you want. It has a great drag-and-drop interface and the scripting language is perfectly suited to getting the job done.

These things combined has created a solid following of game makers who enjoy putting their ideas out there into the universe using gamemaker.