Superpowers vs Unity
When comparing Superpowers vs Unity, the Slant community recommends Superpowers for most people. In the question“What are the best 100% free and easy game engines for beginners?” Superpowers is ranked 13th while Unity is ranked 22nd. The most important reason people chose Superpowers is:
You can spin up a server and work with other people at the same time.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Collaborative
You can spin up a server and work with other people at the same time.
Pro Supports both 2D and 3D
This isn't a 3D with 2D on the side type of engine. The scene-editor supports both 3D and 2D views, allowing ease of use no matter what type of game your making.
Pro Plugin based
The community can develop and release their own plugins to add additional features making game development easier. All of these plugins can be easily downloaded in the app.
Pro Lots of handy built-in editors
It's got a scene-editor, cubic-model creator, text-editor, 2D image / animation importer, and a very useful tile-map editor.
Pro Easy to use programming language
Games can be published to the web with good performance, and the game-framework utilizes TypeScript to make programming games a little bit nicer.
Pro Great community support
Unity is bolstered by a huge, helpful community via its official forums, wiki, Unity Answers, and Unity Asset Store; plus the most-subscribed subreddit of any game engine.
Pro OUYA support
Pro Over 20 platforms
Unity offers over 20 platforms for publishing including mobile, console, web, VR, and more.
Pro Versatile
Not tailored for specific types of games (like Unreal...), so it won't get in your way if you want to make something unique.
Pro Well structured
Overall, a coherent engine with a rational approach. People who complain a lot about being forced to hack around it usually do not read the docs, like the one that describes orders of execution, or specific functions hooks and such. Some like to say it lacks raw power where people who are used to standard optimizations have no problem. For example It is not uncommon to encounter users who complain about low FPS but forgot to activate occlusion, flag static elements, activate animations culling, and so on. As for complaints about C#, people who are transitioning from C++ were already bad at C++ before being bad at C#. They often come from the PC world where the sheer power of today's machines is very forgiving compared to the platforms we had to develop for in the 80s~90s. One of their errors is for example to never read this doc.
Pro Very optimized
Unity runs very smoothly even on systems that are considered "weak" by today's standards.
Pro Lots of assets can be found in the Asset Store
For those developers who can't afford an artist, or aren't skilled enough to create their own art, Unity features an Asset Store full of a wide variety of free and paid assets that can be easily added to a game. The Asset Store has more than just music and art. It also has code and modules that can be added to games including unique lighting or GUI systems. It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.
Pro Works with 3rd party IDEs
You can use any C# IDE for it, but the ones tested which have Unity integration are:
- Microsoft Visual Studio
- MonoDevelop
- Visual Studio Code (much faster than VS, but a bit harder to set up for Unity development)
- JetBrains Rider (very fast, has lots of functionality and best Unity integration, but it is not free)
Pro Flexibility is provided by a strong component programming model
Pro Has a great animation system
Unity provides a great state machine animation system called Mechanim allowing to separate animation from the model and assign the same animoations to different models.
Pro Powerful standard shaders
The built in standard shader in Unity 5 is incredibly optimized and supports PBS/PBR.
Pro Allows for rapid prototyping
Unity's modular system and usability allows for quickly developing a prototype of an idea. It has features like drag & drop editing, shaders, animation and other systems already in place to allow diving right into developing a game.
Pro Easy learning curve
The way the editor is structured, by setting scripts on objects, and the use of a high-level language, C#, makes it easy to learn.
Pro Can create custom forms and tools
Pro Very popular
Unity is a proven game engine. It is used by a wide range of developers - from small indies to triple-A companies such as Microsoft, Paradox, Square Enix and Sega.
Pro Lots of resources to learn from
Unity3D provides an exhaustive documentation where everything is given a full description supplied by a number of examples as well as video and text tutorials and live training sessions to understand the ins and outs of the engine. In addition there's an ever-growing community that can offer advice to help resolve any situations that may arise.
Along with the official Unity resources, there are many high quality (and often free) third party tutorials available.
Pro Great editor
The editor GUI is very powerful and intuitive. It allows pausing gameplay and manipulating the scene at any time as well as progress gameplay frame by frame. It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.
This allows it to be more powerful than other, simpler drag-and-drop engines such as Game Maker Studio, although it can take a bit more experience to learn the workflow.
Pro As of Unity 5 all engine features are free for everyone
As long as the company makes $100k or less, Unity's free version can be used to release games without purchasing the pro version.
Pro Supports 2D and 3D
With Unity knowledge of just one engine is needed to be able to create both 2D and 3D games.
Pro Great community
Great Community support through Forums and Unity Answers.
Pro Provides access to a huge list of assets through Asset Store
There's an Asset Store, providing free and paid assets (including components). It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.
Cons
Con Not frequently updated
Although it's got very nice features as is, and the team does respond to issues at a pretty good rate, the engine itself takes a little while to get updates. It's a 3-4 person team, and they need to work jobs on the side in order to bring in income.
Even though the updates come out a little slower than other engines, the team is still very much committed to the project and still support it well.
Con No native editor for Linux
Though it builds for Linux, the Unity Editor runs only on Windows and Mac. Some users have successfully run the Windows version on Linux via Wine.