Why Unreal Engine 5?

We've made the choice to use Epic Games' Unreal Engine 5 as the game engine for Ride Technician. With the vast amount of game engines available on the market that are free to use, the Unreal Engine provided us with the most out of the box tools to allow us to develop quickly.

The Features

UE5's Blueprint visual scripting system is perfect for our team to quickly prototype features and mechanics. In addition, Epic Games has made an effort to make the engine versitle while doing a majority of the heavy lifting, allowing us to focus on development and not fussing with the engine code to get things to work for our project.

With Unreal's Lumen system, we hope to leverage this amazing lighting tool, to deliver on the art style we are going for in Ride Technician. While we aren't making a huge open world mmorpg, we will be working with a lot of assets and unique lighting that comes with most rides at theme parks, we feel that UE5 will be able to provide us the best results, with minimal engine tweaking.

In addition, developing with Unreal allows us access to the Quixel Megascans library which is loaded with tons of assets that we can use for development, prototyping, and unique situations at zero extra cost. At the end of the day, Unreal allows us to focus on what matters, making Ride Technician.

The Challenges

There will always be challenges when it comes to game development. At the end of the day a game engine is just a tool and whether we are using Unity, Godot, Lumberyard, Unreal, or any other game engine, what matters are the results. Each game engine can accomplish the same things. For us, UE was a choice that allowed us to easily learn and develop at the same time.

While some of our team is familiar with Unreal's development environment, it is brand new to others. Our team has a diverse background when it comes to developing games, our team has developed in Unity, and Godot, which use different coding languages than Unreal. On top of that, we decided to develop using Unreal's Blueprint coding system for the majority of our programming, meaning that even those on our team that are familiar with C++, Unreal's Base coding language, we are still having to learn a new coding language. We do face challenges as the team is learning this new language, however we are excited to deliver a new experience to players that we feel is worth the effort made to learn Blueprints.

We are fortunate enough to have some team members that have developed with Unreal's blueprint system and can lend a hand to the rest of the team. One of the many benefits of Blueprints is that it is easy to pick up and our team is already hard at work using Blueprints productively prototyping out mechanics and features.

In addition, the vast support system Epic Games has provided via their forums and training modules, we feel confident in our team's ability to deliver a unique experience.

The Cost

In short, Unreal Engine 5 has zero cost to develop on and that was a key factor in our choice to use Unreal. While there are many other engines out there that offer the same perk, it can be difficult to navigate the waters when it comes to licensing and Unreal is the most straight forward.

We want to make a game that players will enjoy, and thinking about engine costs is the last thing on our mind. Unreal Engine will allow us to focus on developing an amaIng experience for players and not at all on engine costs.

In Conclusion

There are a lot of amazing game engines out there for developers to use, and at the end of the day it is just a tool. We are excited to be using Epic Games' Unreal Engine 5 to develop Ride Technician, as we feel that UE5 will allow us to focus on what matters most; Developing Ride Technician.

- Neil London (Producer/Director)