Should I use Unity or GameMaker? (2024)

I don't know how good the responses you get will be here, hopefully you have done some research somewhere besides the forum of the specific game engine as you will get pretty biased responses from atleast some of us here.

Considering the game type you are looking for, I'd say Gamemaker is probably better. The only real disadvantage is that the free version does not export everywhere. I personally think it is worth paying for Gamemaker but your personal situation may vary, depending on what all languages you know, etc... There are already plenty of feature comparisons all over the internet so I won't go into all of that.

kburkhart84 said:

I don't know how good the responses you get will be here, hopefully you have done some research somewhere besides the forum of the specific game engine as you will get pretty biased responses from atleast some of us here.

Considering the game type you are looking for, I'd say Gamemaker is probably better. The only real disadvantage is that the free version does not export everywhere. I personally think it is worth paying for Gamemaker but your personal situation may vary, depending on what all languages you know, etc... There are already plenty of feature comparisons all over the internet so I won't go into all of that.

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I'm just using it for personal use to share with friends and thats about it.

Having used just about all engines, my preference is GameMaker. The workflow took me two seconds to get used to. The others, I tend to struggle to get my head around.

From an honest perspective, my recommendation would be to download and try both. Play around and do tutorials etc. You’ll soon figure out which one you tend to like better.

I'd throw in Godot as a third option to investigate along with GM and Unity. Perhaps even Gdevelop if all you want is to build something quickly without coding and for the web to share with friends.

If your goal is to share your work with friends consider that the free edition of GameMaker only exports to Opera.GX, which is somewhat awkward. Your friends would have to install another browser (Opera GX) to play your games, unless you subscribe to one of the paid plans offered by GameMaker (you can subscribe for one month only and export, then quit the sub).
Godot and Gdevelop do not impose paid restrictions on export and are free.

Arguably GM and Godot are "better" at 2D games than Unity. Or at the very least much more comfortable to be working in for 2D game work in my opinion. I find Unity complete overkill for the majority of 2d game development.

Try them out, and decide. All of them have special settings to maintain the look of pixel art, btw.

I asked Bing AI the same question. It called me a baby and told me to stick with Turtle. I explained I was enquiring for someone else and it replied back with

TO L(F,R)IF F>0[FD F RT 90 FD 50]ENDTO O(F,R)IF F>0[C 50]ENDTO S(F,R)IF F>0[C -50 180 C 50 180]ENDTO E(F,R)IF F>0[FD 50 RT 180 C 50 -180 PU RT 180 FD 50 PD RT 90 FD 100]ENDTO R(F,R)IF F>0[RT 180 C 50 -180 PU RT 180 FD 50 PD RT 90 FD 100]ENDPU SETPOS -150 0 PW 5 PDL 100 90O 50 90S 0 90E 100 -90R 100 -90

Samuel Venable said:

I think it is safe to assume this thread won't last long.

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can we get out of this mindset that GMS2 is the only option that is right for people here?

"we cant discuses other engines", Fine I get it: we don't want this forum diluted with advertising other engines, but come on, how are we leading people in the right direction?
GMS2 is far from it's self-pitting self it used to be, and I believe earnest intents into game dev will help people make the right choice. GMS2 is far and above able to hold it's own now days as a serious engine. Let it speak for itself. GMS is a ing adult now...

We can believe in it's future without coddling it forever. This is the type of behavior that will make people NOT take it seriously....

The guy is asking a serious question: as a dev, we owe it to him. He is NOT advertising an engine to compete. WE are telling him what's best in our experience.

Baconielm said:

I'm trying to work on a 2d pixel art souls like, except I don't know whether unity or gamemaker is better, not sure if off topic was the right mark for this.

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Unities 2d tools are not nearly as robust as GMS2 and the learning curve; while helpful in further game dev pursuits, is much steeper especially if you only intend to do a 2d game for now.

GMS2 will allow you to prototype MUCH faster and see results you want to see as a new dev.

Alright allow me to link my game engine and then we can assume this thread will be done for. I will keep it to myself. A lot of you already know about it anyway lel

I'd like people to lose the mindset personally Unity has a steeper learning curve. You can make 3D games a lot quicker in that engine than GM. With the addition of structs, classes, constructors, and many other recent changes to GM it is quickly becoming more like Unity in what the learning curve is like.

There's more to GM than the "easy learning curve" this being flagged as the only reason to use GM make us GM users sound illiterate and labels us as programmer wannabes who are incapable learning anything meaningful and need to be spoon-fed everything. I do not agree with this. It may be true with some users; but that's how everyone starts out is being needy at first. The more we learn and grow the more we can get things done and a lot quicker make progress. The fast prototyping and fast development needs to be emphasized more than the learning curve we don't want to look dumb in front of people using other engines or they will never want to try or switch to GM ever when they'd likely be glad if they did but they wouldn't know it based on how we make it look.

BlitzMax for instance is a lot more complex code-wise but it's also considered by some people a toy for kids and critisized as not a real engine or programming language because of its learning curve being too simple or easy to digest. @Amon and @rIKmAN came from the Blitz community btw and from what I've seen they like GM quite a bit by comparison. Maybe they have something to add here on why they made their engine switch to GM.

I've heard Unity's 2D has gotten a lot better but I havent worked with it so I wouldn't know much.

And to add to the comment above, it really bothers me that they insist on promoting GameMaker as "program games without knowing how to program" and as mentioned above "which is super easy" too. This gives a very vision of the type of engine like Scratch.

While I understand the marketing ploy, it's important to point out that GameMaker is capable of creating good games with high graphic/visual/sound quality - even more so with the new recent updates.

The fact that it seems

easy can be dangerous, as it doesn't convey a very professional vision, or that it is capable of creating high-quality games. The fact is that the biggest companies still invest in these most popular and consolidated engines in the market, leaving more indies and small companies for GameMaker...

Samuel Venable said:

I think it is safe to assume this thread won't last long.

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Well, it's been up for two weeks already? And I saw it the day it was posted and left it up as, these days, it makes sense to be a little more flexible. GameMaker is not what it once was, nor is the company that makes it. I mean, the rule is more about PROMOTING other products, rather than discussing/comparing their features, so ... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That said, I'm not really sure of the merit of this topic right now. The OP hasn't been back to the forums since they posted the topic, and I think that everyone who's posting here already KNOWS the pros/cons of using GameMaker/Unity/Godot, etc...

LowercaseText said:

Personally, I use Gamemaker for 2D and godot for 3D because for me, Unity is broken, and every time I try to open a project, the editor opens, freezes, and crashes. But now I am very familiar with both engines so I'd choose them over unity. Exept there are still a few project's I didn't quite finish (because my unity broke) that I'd like to finish if I could ever get to fixing my unity

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I doubt that it's really broke. The required specs likely changed as people wouldn't be using it if it did this for the average user.

I found this website, that you might want to look at that has a review of game engines :
Best Game Engines for Beginners in 2023

Please bear in mind the famous saying, " Its not what the airplane can do, it's what the pilot does with the airplane "

Lord KJWilliams said:

I found this website, that you might want to look at that has a review of game engines :
Best Game Engines for Beginners in 2023

Please bear in mind the famous saying, " Its not what the airplane can do, it's what the pilot does with the airplane "

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That link actually called GameMaker completely open source. xp I wish people who wrote articles like these tried a bit more to get the information right.