At the moment we are looking into unity, I don't have as much experience with it as I do in UDK but scripting in unity is much easier. they have tons upon tons of fire and forget scripts and lots of stuff
to use right out of the box. The new version has some really really cool upgrades that I would like to take advantage of such as the new animation system the fact that i moved from max to blender also affords me some really interesting workflow enhancements with unity, as unity supports the .blend file natively like an FBX file meaning i can basically just save it into the assets folder and it will read it, separate meshes separate layers doesn't matter its all there, All just a save away no export this or export that, the tests i have done so far i can honestly say its saved me about 20+ hours of work cause i can save the file out animate some build new actions for the mesh and then bingo unity just picks up the anim's and we have movement on the mesh with no fuss.
Blender,
Blender has a bad rap unless you actually use it, most people see it as infererer, and when your talking about max and maya yah its limited and what not as far as pro support, i mean honestly blender can do what ever these two do and more, i hated the interface but gave it a try and its been about a year now and i love it and haven't looked back. + its free and i don't have to pay for it to make cool stuff and sell online, or use it to build a game i plan on selling, blender has become my goto tool for modeling and animation, I despise open gl rendering and can pick it out of a crowd but cycles is pretty good. that and we should start getting use to it cause with the way M$ and Apple are going Linux is about as good as us windows users are going to get, honestly i could think of worse things to transition too.
Unity,
At the moment we have talked about moving to Unity as i stated before and well the real power in unity is not the free version, however we are going to look at using the free version for now and taking donations to get unity 4 to upgrade the lighting materials and what ever else the Unity engine does not support on the free mode. That means we will have to raise around 2400 or more if we get the rights to use it, It will go onto the Xbox as Unity supports Xbox, but it costs a bit more for the Xbox plug-in. This we will be looking into more and more as we near the completion of the game,
so don't worry about us sticking our hands out just yet.
The other reason We like unity is the Web Player function it will allow us to develop and let people test as we go so you guys can play it and test it out for us and leave comments on our progress and what you think of some of the changes we will be doing. This will give us the most flexible way to improve the game as we develop it, and it will give you guys the ability to play and decide what you like and what you don't as we develop it giving you the game you most want to see.
