Switching Game Engines Halfway Through Development

An anonymous reader writes: Third-party game engines are wonderful creations, allowing developers to skip a lengthy and complicated part of the development process and spend more time on content creation. But each engine has its own strengths and weaknesses, and they may not be apparent at the beginning of a project. If you realize halfway through that your game doesn't work well on the engine you picked, what do you do? Jeff LaMarche describes how he and his team made the difficult decision to throw out all their work with Unity and start over with Unreal. He describes some technical limitations, like Unity's 32-bit nature, and some economic ones, like needing to pay $500 per person for effective version control. He notes that Unreal Engine 4 has its problems, too, but the biggest reason to switch was this: "Our team just wasn't finding it easy to collaborate. We weren't gelling as a cohesive team and we often felt like the tools were working against us."

Comments

Can we rid the word of "Gelling"?

[damn_registrars]

I am really, really, tired of that word. It is pitifully overused by management from one end of our continent to another. I just got used to being on a constant watch for paradigm shifts and now I am told I need to make sure that my team is gelling sufficiently. We need to campaign to have that word striken completely from the English language; gel should not be a verb for that sense.