I’ve been spending quite sometime on the Unity engine lately, more than three hours a day to be exact. The engine is very nice and quite easy actually! It’s a whole different story if you’ve been using C++ engine with no world editor nor scripting support. I’ll be honest when I first started programming games I began using the Irrlicht engine, the documentation and the tutorials are amazing but I was kinda too newbie to begin programming games without a world editor. It’s hard to do input, animation, AI and these stuff without a world editor.
So in the beginning I was kinda lost, because I’m typically used to more “graphically appealing” interfaces, and the Irrlicht code is kinda dry if you’re a total newbie, even though there is “IrrEdit” – a world editor for Irrlicht – for your aid, it was overwhelming to me. I left the whole thing and used Unity for the goal of knowing the basics, Unity really help you as a starter to understand some important concepts when beginning to develop a game, and in my case that was what I really needed.
It’s known that in order to be a professional game programmer you have to master C++ in order to use it in your game development, so here I’m going for Irrlicht once again!