Hello, my friend planning on trying to make a 2d game to get our feet wet with learning a game engine. I would like the engine to be unreal as I am a vfx artist, and from what I have seen and read unreal seems to be the front runner for real-time solutions in vfx pipelines, and perhaps even some short film making. I wanted to start out with a 2d game though, as it seems more manageable for a a couple new comers to game design. I haven't found much on 2d game design with unreal other than it exists. Are there any major disadvantages to creating a 2d game in unreal verses something like Unity?

Also, slightly tangential question, in your opinion how much ahead is unreal of unity in terms of real-time high quality renders? I've seen the "Adam" short film made and unity and it blew me away, probably more than any unreal short film I've seen. I've heard though that it took a ridiculous amount of work and people to get it working that way, while unreal is closer to that out of the box.

This brings me to my third question. The renders in the "Adam" have a very cool like 10% stylized quality to their renders while a lot of the stuff I see in unreal is a similar sort of render style. How flexible is the unreal engine when it comes to rendering. If I were advanced enough would I be able to customize the renders to get these sort of semi-stylized renders?

Thanks so much for anyone willing to help me out. I know these were a lot of questions. Hopefully they weren't to obvious to the game dev masters here.

Cheers,

I've been making 2D games in Unreal, it's not well supported, but I've only had a few issues. It has fewer issues if you're doing 3D models as a 2D game. Unity has more support and updates for 2D games.

I think Unreal is a little ahead in visual quality, but a good artist with experience would be able to make something pretty much as good in either.

You can mess with the renderer in Unreal as well as all the shaders. It's very flexible, but also all that flexibility requires knowledge and experience to utilize well.

Thanks a ton Davin. That was exactly the information I was looking for.