Helpful Notes from the Airborne Guys

Helpful post about the engine choice from the guys working on Airborne


"It will most likely not be produced with UDK - though this decision is not final, we are not even in real preproduction yet. 

UDK has the best base when it comes to artist friendly tools, a great built in materialeditor makes it easy to create stunning results in no time. But the whole dated coding/scripting progress makes it a pain in the ass to use, for us as artists (don't know code for shit) and also programmers. So to us, UDK never was the right choice when to comes to actually coding this game, it never felt right.

Unity on the other hand is very nice to work with for prototyping and such, overall the coding tasks are much nicer to be handled inside unity - but we have yet to port one final artset from udk to unity to see how it performs on a larger scale.

In the end from an artists point of view i don't care which engine is going to be used in the production.
Looking at it from the past few years we worked on it here and there, tested around with different solutions it is not an easy decision. But it will really come down to the budget.

We will most likely not be able to produce it with an Unreal Build (Unreal because then modifications to a lot of things would be possible, as opposed to UDK). I wouldn't mind using Unreal 4 or Cryengine either, but both will need quite a budget just for the license - and in case of the cryengine also quite a bunch of specialized coders.
Which leads us back to unity, as beeing right now the most likely tool to work with.

But as said this is a decision that we can make once we know the budget we can spend. At the moment our budgetting plan is based on unity. And i have no doubt we can port all assets from UDK (Art for the groundgameplay build, the stuff Manuel has been showing lately) over to unity or any other engine. In the End its just 3d models and shaders. But as Unity lacks great shaders to begin with, this stuff will need to be rebuilt from ground up, which is out of our possibilities right now. It would just eat way too much time. Also we don't need super duper art for the gamedesign prototypes and we do not need perfect gameplay for the artbuilds right now. So the presentation we do for kickstarter including a couple of gameplaydemos will be a mix and match of both, good art from UDK and gameplay prototyping of the past months from Unity which will also not look like shit, but will not be as polished as the ground part."