In reality it was a hard moment for me to perform the switch. After all, of the 9 years as a game developer six were unto Unity development mostly and I have a decent career of games released on many platforms thanks to this engine as I worked as a freelancer and employee for some companies. However, as time goes on I started to think about making games on my own and Unity was being my first choice due to the vast experience I gathered over the years. My very first obstacle is that I only have a personal edition (or indie as it was called back then) so I had my limitations. The other was that after all these years I was getting tired of Unity and many of the shortcomings and workarounds in order to get the projects reach the completion step.
Unity is an excellent platform for designing and prototyping your games, if not the best to my opinion. With its ease of use, drag and drop nature for assets and behavioral script based programming you can have a prototype of your game running in record time. This facilitates game design as a project continues its development. And it’s after the prototype stage where things can get ugly for the actual programmers of the game since this means the complexity is about to increase.
To make a long story short, I needed a different tool that offered me more flexibility and freedom as a programmer without being stuck with any paradigm. JMonkey Engine SDK offered me what I needed and more:
- Create my own game architecture for each project and not adapt my game to a predefined one.
- Able to edit code and run my project using one single application instead of two, saving myself a back and forth process.
- Able to write testeable code without external tools but one existing for a programming language.
- Release multiplatform games with an extremely affordable license (FREE!!! :D).
- Have a decent performance as well as easy coding.
JMonkey Engine and Panda3D fitted my needs but there is an inherent issue with performance in Python and with C++ there was a debugging issue and Android porting was not seamless as well. Another point that made me choose JME was the similarities between Java and C# on a basic level. To porting my current code to Java was fast.
JMonkey Engine was clear to let me know that is a programmer oriented SDK for making apps and games. It became more straightforward development on my end. However, I must warn that this engine is not easy and I would still recommend Unity for beginners into game development, but move out of it once you get enough experience and want to branch out. Do not stick to it.
