Unreal is pretty new to the indie scene nonetheless. Until UDK, only big studios were able to afford Unreal, and even UDK was, while much more powerful than Unity 3.X, held back by that attrociously high royalities of 25%.

Yeah absolutely.

Unreal still requires 5% royalties on gross sales, but the price per seat for developers (considering the feature set) is bound to attract some attention from the indie scene.

Agreed 100%... I think the current price policy of Epic for UE4 is extremly Indiefriendly, especially when you factor in no cut features AND full source code.

I am certain it will play out nicely for Epic, who will become the second big name in the Indiescene (which they already managed with UDK IMO), and if Unity does not only speed up the pace of development (which they already did with Unity 5... just took them 1.5 years to push out a new version while Unity 3 hung around for, well, what felt like an eternity in comparison), but also rethinks their pricing, Epic might overtake them at one point...

You have to give Unity credit though for their Unite cons and other things that are open to Indies... it just seems for Unity the Indie Scene is front and center of their attention, while for Epic it is still just a side show.... might also explain why Epic can make those terrific deals for Indie devs, while for Unity the sales to Indies need to generate most of the money.

Anyway, this is going OT.... sorry for that.

You have to give Unity credit though for their Unite cons and other things that are open to Indies... it just seems for Unity the Indie Scene is front and center of their attention, while for Epic it is still just a side show.... might also explain why Epic can make those terrific deals for Indie devs, while for Unity the sales to Indies need to generate most of the money.

Oh I think Unity is a fantastic engine. It's simply amazing for prototyping ideas and seeing them come to life in a matter of minutes :) If it wasn't for Unity, we probably wouldn't be seeing Unreal at such a steal either; it's a great time to be an indie developer.

*puts on Epic Employee hat*

Unreal still requires 5% royalties on gross sales, but the price per seat for developers (considering the feature set) is bound to attract some attention from the indie scene.

Just to clear up A Thing.
The royalties are on a per-quarter amount and you only pay after the first $3,000 (gross) made in that quarter.
In theory this means that you could make $2,999/quarter and not have to pay Epic a dime. If you factor in the 30% cut many places take then you can make $2099.30/quarter before the 5% kicks in and then it is only 5% over the $3,000.

Reading the FAQ it seems to imply that it is per-product, so in theory you could have 4 games out, all pulling in less than $3,000/quarter each so you end up with just over $10K/quarter net income and don't have to pay Epic a dime.
(I'd double check that of course but that's what I read when it says 'per product')

For $20.

(Although personally I'd say if you can afford to keep the subscription do so; we push out updates pretty quickly with release 4.6 due soon and release 4.7 work well under way and there are hot fixes which go out too - plus who doesn't want to follow master and see every live commit? ;))

What programming languages do you know? It is usually not too difficult for a programmer to switch from one language to another, but if you are already extremely comfortable in certain languages it can bias the decision toward either Unreal or Unity.

I did have a hand in doing some C++ but that was like years ago and forgot literally everything. Basically, I have zero knowledge of coding as a result. I'm no programmer but from my time with the Unity tutorial mentioned above, I may have to get familiar with it again .

I've been messing around with Unreal 4.5.1 quite a bit over the last month, and have to say that it's a damn fine engine.

For a one off payment of $20 (you can cancel your subscription as soon as you have all of the files you need) you get access to the full source, as well as the binary installers. I'm building from source because I want to use the Wwise plugin, but since Microsoft released Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition (http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/vs2013-community-vs.aspx) it's really inexpensive to get up and running.

I've only had a quick look at Unity's pricing model, but it seems like you get much more bang for your buck with Unreal at the moment; the pro subscription (for Unity) is $75 a month which I assume you still need to do any kind of post processing.

There is a huge amount of documentation for Unreal as well, including some really useful tutorials videos on YouTube (provided by Epic). Only took an hour or so to build this from scratch (with an FPS camera):

Stop it your making me jealous! Great work, cant wait to get to your skill level.

Really, stick with Unity Free until you get a fair understanding of 3D Engines and how to create games. Moving over from Unity to UE4 is possible at any time, and while C++ is not C#, and the Unity Editor is different from the Unreal Editor, 60-75% of your knowledge will still be transferrable. Don't worry too much about the tools you use, worry about honing your general and basic skills that will apply to all tools and languages you will use over the course of your career (professional or hobby doesn't matter), and worry about your efficiency and planing skills (Most probably you have no idea yet how many years of your life the game you dream about at the moment might consume, if you don't compromise a lot and get much better skills)

Thanks, I think I will stick with learning Unity for now. This saves me the trouble of learning a second engine and deciding which one.

Modeling and animating are both enormous parts of games. Games require content. Where are you getting content from? If you aren't a modeler and animator, the Unity Store can be a great resource. If you're looking for the Unreal Marketplace, the best you can say is that it is not quite empty. Of course, if you have modelers and animators for your project that can be nice.

Guess unity is my best bet after all.

Stop it your making me jealous! Great work, cant wait to get to your skill level.

No no, I'm a programmer... I have no skill when it comes to building levels etc; kind of my point with Unreal - very easy to quickly produce things that look great.

Stop it your making me jealous! Great work, cant wait to get to your skill level.

No no, I'm a programmer... I have no skill when it comes to building levels etc; kind of my point with Unreal - very easy to quickly produce things that look great.

It is quite easy to do that with both.

If you have the assets, the visual quality is trivial. Drop in the beautiful models and hook up the fancy-shaded textures and it looks very pretty. Use a terrain tool and they are heavily optimized so you can have millions of trees with formulaic branches and grass that flows smoothly with wind zones, all of it with zero coding work. Built in physics engines make things fall and bump and collide with a reasonable physics response, again by only clicking a few checkboxes.

That is why I mentioned assets as a major decision point in my earlier post. If you have people who can build all those models and textures and other assets then wonderful for you. Otherwise you will need to consider where you intend to get the assets. I look at the scene above and see assets that I assume are hooked into the existing functionality. It probably uses built-in physics plus whatever visual assets you've got. It immediately makes me wonder, where did you get the art?

The bigger concern for programming is writing all the bits and pieces that make them work together. The work remains to tie your resource spawners to collision systems, tie your inventories together with the UI, tie your assorted components into gameplay mechanics rules, tie your mechanics together into larger systems, hook your game up across the network, and otherwise convert the engine from a fancy renderer plus physics simulator into an actual game. That is generally an enormous and complex process.

*puts on Epic Employee hat*

That is why I mentioned assets as a major decision point in my earlier post. If you have people who can build all those models and textures and other assets then wonderful for you. Otherwise you will need to consider where you intend to get the assets.

If the assets are in FBX format however then UE4 could make use of things from the Unity Asset Store; if they are in some crazy format then they can't of course... having not looked at the asset store for Unity I couldn't say either way of course