When you pick up your game engine to start learning it to make games you'll sometimes search for games or opinions about it.

I haven't used 2D , maybe just a little bit like moving my character that's all, some of you may say it isn't relevant , what's your point ?

my point is I don't want to edit complex things in udk " if I can " just to make other games are possible to create with UDK.

My point is every time I search for udk , I find people saying it's for FPS games only , or in other words " it's hard to create other games with this engine beside fps games "

I really love something called survival/horror games where you don't have weapons or if you had then it would be simple ones like an axe , so is it possible to create these games with UDK ?

To be honest unity and UDK are the famous engines out there , I didn't find an engine that lots of people recommended more than those two , and I think unity is not free or it doesn't give you lots of options with the free version.

So what's your suggestion ? and if you're a UDK user is it true what they said and I mentioned here ?

For 2D games, you honestly only really need a single function like:

drawImage(Image* img, int x, int y, float rotation)

So an engine like UDK or Unity is overkill. That said, they both provide almost exactly the function above as part of their 2D GUI systems. For the sake of keeping your dependencies low and thus your game more portable, I recommend something like SDL (if you are dealing with C/C++) and MonoGame if you want to use .NET.

If you are planing on a very busy 2D game, you may want to look into using something like OpenGL with SDL to provide hardware acceleration.

I really love something called survival/horror games where you don't have weapons or if you had then it would be simple ones like an axe , so is it possible to create these games with UDK?

I don't use Unity myself, and I'm not a horror game fan. That being said, aren't survival horror games are mostly determined by the content fed to FPS engines?

What I mean is, take Counter-Strike, make shadow-filled levels, replace enemy insurgents with zombies or whatever, give the player 10 bullets instead of 10,000 bullets, and you have a survival-horror. Code-wise, what major differences are there?

UDK can be used for FPS or any other first person games. It can also be used for top-view strategy games, 3D platformers, or anything you want. People that say it can only be used for FPS are badly misinformed.

Take a look at the UDK showcase, I'm pretty sure there'll be plenty of examples of "not-FPS" games there.

Anyway, as Krasten said, UDK is probably too much for a simple 2D game. There are countless possible frameworks for creating a 2D game, from Mono and MonoGame to MOAI.

That being said, aren't survival horror games are mostly determined by the content fed to FPS engines?

I think he means survival horror like in Amnesia, that is FP but definitely not a S, differing from Killing Floor, as an example. In case you have never seen Amnesia, the game doesn't have any weapons at all.

Usually, these games are filled with puzzles and scripted scenes rather than hordes of enemies.

UDK can be used for FPS or any other first person games. It can also be used for top-view strategy games, 3D platformers, or anything you want. People that say it can only be used for FPS are badly misinformed.

Take a look at the UDK showcase, I'm pretty sure there'll be plenty of examples of "not-FPS" games there.

Well, I guess people saying this either have not tried UDK and jump to conclusions because of the name of the engine and the series of game that spawned it, or they tried to build something the easy way: download a tutorial / demo project and swap out the graphical objects. And of course, a lot of the demos out there are still FPSes, as it was THE mainstream genre for years now.

To the TO:

I have only expierience with Unity, but I guess Unity and UDK / UE4 are not worlds apart in structure (even though there might be important technical differences, I don't think they will dictate what you can or can't build with an engine).

The important thing to note is: these engines are 3D Engines in their cores. They can be used for 2D Projects (Unity started to put in basic 2D Support into the engine), as a 2D Project can be constructed just fine in 3D Space, with a camera that gets fixed to two dimensions (this way you can also build hybrids like Fez, which used the 3D Engine quite cleverly).

But in their core they stay 3D Engines, with all the horsepower still under the hood (thus probably idling and using system resources for nothing while showing basic 2D Content).

But I am not sure you asked for a 2D Game Engine. Did you?

Anyway...

Your question about Unity:

Unity can be absolutely free. IF you don't make more than (guessing here, don't know exactly) 10'000 per year with your games, and you do not need the following:

- deferred rendering (useful if you need lots of lights in the scene (BUT: It still has limits, lights are still not "free"!))

- Image Effects (like Screenspace Ambien Occlusion (helps with making the shading more believable), Global Fog (Fog that can be applied to a certain height for example), anything that changes the way the camera renders the image)

- Soft Realtime Shadows (hard edged shadows are now also included in the free version)

- some pro stuff like the profiler (lets you see which of your GameObjects eats up all your resources)

So yes, Unity Pro costs a lot. The question is, do you really need all the stuff above? Chances are, if you want to create "AAA Quality!" or anything that comes close, you might need it. And you will have to hack around to get similar effects in Unity non-Pro.

If you talk about UDK I advise you to look into the Unreal Engine 4. You can get it with a single monthly subscription of 20$ and then cancel the subscription, still keep using the engine and create stuff with it. UE4 is the most nextgen Engine you can get for a low price today.

Just be aware, with UE4 AND UDK you have to pay royalities if you make over a certain amount of profit with your project (I think 50k$?). In the UDK days it was 25%, for UE4 its now 5%.

Might not affect you, still important to note Unity has NO royalities, which is why a lot of Indie studios pick Unity over the Unreal products. If you cannot afford the full engine license (multiple 100k$), Unity is the best choice without royalities. That is why they can keep charging 1500$ for their Pro version.

The fact of the matter is that UDK and Unity both offer comprehensive environments for building a game. They both tie in physics, audio, input, rendering, entity management, scripting, and more in a workflow tailored for turning content into a playable game. Yes - they both were designed with 3d in mind but I'm not aware of many publicly available 2d toolkits which offer the same productive environment. Yes, there are other options, but these 2 options are very good.

I would suggest Unity simply because you will find a larger community and more resources to learn from and make use of in your own development. Either way, UDK and Unity are both going to get you going much quicker than starting from scratch or from a purely-rendering base. It's the other systems and tying them together and having an intuitive environment to do so which gives you the advantage - extra overkill features and all.

For 2D games, you honestly only really need a single function like:

drawImage(Image* img, int x, int y, float rotation)

So an engine like UDK or Unity is overkill. That said, they both provide almost exactly the function above as part of their 2D GUI systems. For the sake of keeping your dependencies low and thus your game more portable, I recommend something like SDL (if you are dealing with C/C++) and MonoGame if you want to use .NET.

If you are planing on a very busy 2D game, you may want to look into using something like OpenGL with SDL to provide hardware acceleration.

I didn't mean I want my games to be 2D , I only meant that I never actually used 2D graphics as if I was working on a real project , but I'm planning on learning SFML since I think they'll port it to android which is what I actually want for 2D games programming , but for the pc I'm planning on 3D mostly , thanks for your reply and suggestions ^^

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Actually what I meant by horror survival is the kind of games that you only have basic tools , even those tools won't be used as weapons but mostly to solve things like puzzles.

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Exactly , so the only problem is the camera's view ? I actually can make a lot of games with first person view , not sure why would they say it's only for fps games ?

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Thanks for your reply , I really picked UDK because it's free and popular, I didn't really ask about 2D engines I only mentioned that I didn't work that much , for why I mentioned is because I wanted to clear that I was new to graphics design/game dev.

about the unity cost Is one of the reasons why I didn't think about getting even the free one.

But one question if I may ask , isn't UE4 the same as udk but with advanced things/more things , so I learnt UDK now and I liked it but I wanted more things and then bought UE4 I wouldn't have to learn it all over again because it's almost the same ? what do you think ?

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Sorry about that guys , if you thought I wanted 2D for pc games , I really didn't I only mentioned it as I said because I wanted to clear that I was new to graphic design / game dev , for the 2D graphic design I'm much more into SFML just because they'll port it to android + it's much simpler than others.

Unity is good , everytime I search for such topics the first thing people say is " use unity! " which actually means it's one of the best , but I'm not sure about getting it just because of the cost , UDK is much better on that part.

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Thanks guys for Helping!

Thanks for your reply , I really picked UDK because it's free and popular, I didn't really ask about 2D engines I only mentioned that I didn't work that much , for why I mentioned is because I wanted to clear that I was new to graphics design/game dev.

about the unity cost Is one of the reasons why I didn't think about getting even the free one.

But one question if I may ask , isn't UE4 the same as udk but with advanced things/more things , so I learnt UDK now and I liked it but I wanted more things and then bought UE4 I wouldn't have to learn it all over again because it's almost the same ? what do you think ?

Hurdur.... now we would need an Unreal Junkie that used UDK AND has switched to UE4 already

I am just a humble long time Unity user who dabbled in a different Indie engine for some time, and while being interested in UDK when I started out with Unity in 2010, the royalities of 25% back then was enough of a turn-off for me that I never really tried it.

I am much more interested in UE4 now, but with Unity 5 coming up, and being busy creating a game prototype in Unity 4 at the moment, I will most probably not be able to try UE4 this year. Which is a shame, I hear good things about the engine and I love the Indie-friendly Licensing they do!

About comparing UDK to UE4:

Why don't you do some research on your own? I know the Epic Page is literally filled with new marketing material on UE4, had a quick glance at it earlier this year. The Epic page was filled to the brim with Pages and Documentation about UDK last time I checked in 2011.

So there is a good chance somewhere is a comparison between UE4 and UE3 (which the UDK bases on). If there is no such page, you could ask the question on their Forum and would most probably get a much better response than here.

Something that I can already tell you is that with UE4 you get the full source, if you want it. I do not think you had the full source with the UDK back in the day, that might have changed though.

If the UDK still is a binary only release, that might be one important advantage if you want to start extending the functionality of the engine for your own game.

My own opinion? Its safe to assume the whole Editor will be quites similar between UE4 and UDK... Scripting languages seem to be still the same. What might have changed (besides whats going on under the hood) is the API, but that might be still not be to different because of backward compatibility (for people porting from UE3 to UE4).

Thanks for your reply , I really picked UDK because it's free and popular, I didn't really ask about 2D engines I only mentioned that I didn't work that much , for why I mentioned is because I wanted to clear that I was new to graphics design/game dev.

about the unity cost Is one of the reasons why I didn't think about getting even the free one.

But one question if I may ask , isn't UE4 the same as udk but with advanced things/more things , so I learnt UDK now and I liked it but I wanted more things and then bought UE4 I wouldn't have to learn it all over again because it's almost the same ? what do you think ?

Hurdur.... now we would need an Unreal Junkie that used UDK AND has switched to UE4 already

I am just a humble long time Unity user who dabbled in a different Indie engine for some time, and while being interested in UDK when I started out with Unity in 2010, the royalities of 25% back then was enough of a turn-off for me that I never really tried it.

I am much more interested in UE4 now, but with Unity 5 coming up, and being busy creating a game prototype in Unity 4 at the moment, I will most probably not be able to try UE4 this year. Which is a shame, I hear good things about the engine and I love the Indie-friendly Licensing they do!

About comparing UDK to UE4:

Why don't you do some research on your own? I know the Epic Page is literally filled with new marketing material on UE4, had a quick glance at it earlier this year. The Epic page was filled to the brim with Pages and Documentation about UDK last time I checked in 2011.

So there is a good chance somewhere is a comparison between UE4 and UE3 (which the UDK bases on). If there is no such page, you could ask the question on their Forum and would most probably get a much better response than here.

Something that I can already tell you is that with UE4 you get the full source, if you want it. I do not think you had the full source with the UDK back in the day, that might have changed though.

If the UDK still is a binary only release, that might be one important advantage if you want to start extending the functionality of the engine for your own game.

My own opinion? Its safe to assume the whole Editor will be quites similar between UE4 and UDK... Scripting languages seem to be still the same. What might have changed (besides whats going on under the hood) is the API, but that might be still not be to different because of backward compatibility (for people porting from UE3 to UE4).

Thanks for your reply , I don't usually ask in the main forum when I start learning , I usually just pick up a book or something and start learning from there and then when I finish and still got some more question I go and ask.

I'm not actually that worried about programming using scripting languages , because usually they're much similar to java/c++ which I've used for a while.

Thanks for your reply , I'll give UDK a go and see what happens , I hope it'll be an easy one ^^