Most Underrated Game Engines 

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It's so good to also highlight the other options, good video!

GDevelop is a great starting point, especially for those interested in 2D. For 3D though, it still has a long way to go.

The thing is: you may find versatility, ease to use, a short learning curve: but at the end the problem is support: UE, Unity and Godot have tons of tutorials, online teachers , helpers a solid strong community that are able to help for free when you are stuck in a problem

Thank you for the GDevelop love, Mike!🎉

finally someone talking about defold engine, i tried it for a while i have to admit its a fantastic engine, especially for beginners

Dragonruby is also a great option for slightly experienced devs. It's allot easier than a full on framework but the hot reloading is fantastic. Ruby is a joy to use.

GDevelop is getting some sick 3D tools, too. I hope they keep that up.

Great callouts! Thanks for your informative insights! 👍👍

Thanks for making this video. I became a MicroStudio fan after you did a video for the native app option vs browser only version last year. Thinking about playing with the Wicket game engine based on the coverage. Thanks for what you do!

Awesome list! Thank you! Love to hear about this kind of things

Very useful coverage! Thanks Mike ☺

I you'll mention Unigine someday, which also has community (free) version and well known for benchmarks such as superposition, vallery and heaven

GDevelop is such a great 2D engine and was my start to game development and it's super easy to pick up the visual language

Came after the Unity Controversy but I will be sharing around this video. Its always great to know your options.

Amazing video bro!! Thanks

Thanks for this, Defold sounds like it could be my cup of tea.

It's a good, solid list that offers something for everyone. You're thinking seems to align with mine. I was curious if GDevelop would make the list as it's not really underrated but it's not one of the big boys either.

I've been using Flax for my game, it's honestly really cool and one of my favorite things is that it is fast. I've tried both Unreal and Unity and Flax is just by far the fastest of the three, and provides some similar features. It has some rough edges but most of the bugs I've encountered can be fixed by an engine restart- which takes ~5 seconds from my testing. Also, the graphics seem way easier to configure to your liking than something like Unity with so many pipelines to have to fiddle with and learn... Unreal does still take the cake for graphics quality, but Flax is pretty fast in rendering performance as well, so that's useful. The main developer is also a graphics programmer so Flax has lots of potential to realize even cooler graphics.

Love that C3 is actually included in the first list lol - GDevelop is a great tool as well

i think there's one thing you forgot to mention and that's pico 8 for game dev that want's to learn lua but also make very small 2d game projects in a week with the limited 8x8 canvas for characters and tile sets and fun possibilities of making small games that could be stepping stones to a big project. awesome video of showing different game engines that have not been reconised by the game dev community, i think newcomers or veterans will be looking forward of trying different engines out of curiosity or for a change of pace.

very informative video 👍

Thanks! I'll look them up 🎉

3:40, Micro:Studio is pretty easy to set up on some *Pi if one wants a more local or private installation. My main gripe with it is that all text is always printed centered. Not great if you want a good UI for your game.

As soon as I saw this, I just knew that you was going miss out ( as most do ! ) the 'App Game Kit' ( AGK by the Game creators. They have been around since 1999 and are well astablished company and have a solid language for writing with 3D ( and 2D ) commands with shaders and lighting etc.

Gonna shout out Clickteam Fusion 2.5 it's been around and innovated upon since the 90s!

Defold mentioned 🥳

great video, thanks

torque3d would be another wildly underrated game engine, certainly the best network code out of the rest of these game engines and has an active development schedule and roadmap, since your last video on Torque3D 5 years ago it has added PBR, IBL, screen space global illumination and a bunch of other more modern techniques

You have no idea, the number of times where every time I mention GDevelop as a game engine I use I always get the same response: "Huh? Never heard of it?" or "Your game's pretty impressive, but why not move to Unity because using gdevelop can be really limiting." Like seriously, one of the main reasons why I'm still using gdevelop for my current game is because of how easy and lightweight it is. And also because of this goal I have in mind: The same way games like Undertale and katana zero made game maker studio popular, hopefully games like mine sheds more light on gdevelop. Thanks Gamefromscratch for the extra mention!

you've probably mentioned it somewhere (i hope), but Armory3D is an interesting and underrated Engine itself, even though really it is just a modded version of Blender 3D. Which is why i find it so underrated, it's two workspaces in one! All the cool stuff you can do with Shader graph, Animation, and the physics in Blender also makes it pretty advanced for achieving any game style you want too. Biggest issue with it right now is, Bugs and crashes. There isn't much for documentation as well which makes it kind of scary for beginners or someone who may run into bugs or issues and can't resort to reading the documentation to find out why, and won't have much luck looking for tutorials as well.

Thx for video!

I would recommend kaboomjs, which is definitelly a very nice one in terms of api.. Gdevelop definitelly deserves a mention more than construct3 does imo

Huge plus for microStudio!

Defold is best engine. Lua is the best language that his very fast and versatile. It has the fewest keywords of any other mainstream language, so you can't overengineer things. Functions are first class types, so you can do very clever things if you need/want to. Data manipulation is so much easier than other languages. If you have ever thought that the other engines are bloated and full of stuff you don't use, then use Defold. You'll find it very barebones. You will want to use britzl's libraries for things like cameras, input, etc. Don't use it for 3D. edit: and you won't find an engine that makes building for other platforms so easy. It's also absurdly fast when iterating. Build times during development are less than a second. No "reloading domain". You build for HTML, it just works. You build for any platform, it just works. No silliness like you have to deal with Unity.

Flax engine is also Unreal like tbh. The project structure is identical for example, it even does some nice things like treating plugins as its own projects.

Personally, I'm a fan of the Quake engines. They're easy to mod, open source, and they run really fast thanks to some genius optimizations. It's only a good choice if you want to make a first person 3D game though

Before Unreal engine indie developers preferred CryEngine from CryTech. Kingdom Come Deliverance, Prey (2017) used it.

Defold is great, batteries included.

Not sure if it’s under rated or not but it’s definitely obscure and it’s an engine I bought a while ago called lead works engine or ultra engine. I know it uses lua and C++ and has been getting updates, but not sure whether it’s a quality engine or not since I rarely see anyone cover it but it’s been on steam for a long time and it’s just fascinating to me because it reminds me of like early 2000 oblivion art style and what not with what’s been showcased. It’s basically licensed based but you then don’t have to pay any royalties after buying the license which is nice. But I still don’t know if the engine is good for game development because my coding skills are none existent I just got it to play around with and see if I could practice lua with it at some point.

Esenthel is pretty impressive. Ever spent any time with it?

I wanna chime in with Dragonruby here for a game engine that's purely code-driven just like Raylib. It was covered here some time ago and it's just gotten better and better!

I absolutely love defold, its really amazing and I wish more people could see it, its like the godot for lua. Another i think is underrated is CryEngine. I dont see alot of people talking about lately, if you want 3d it works

Game maker has been around for a lot more than 15 years. It has been around for more than 20 years. It was one of the very few drag and drop engines that existed in a time when those ways of working were new.

Only 4 cylinders for Unreal? I figured it would be more like an old v8 since it uses C++. Great video!

this video is gold

defold has one of the best user interfaces in any game engine. I really enjoyed it but I wanted to jump ship to c# and unity for tutorials and future jobs and stuff. Microstudio is great, but there is a severe lack of tutorials that really held me back. It is possibly one of the most polished engines in the list design-wise though

Harfang3D (not shown) looks interesting.

any opinion on Torque ??

Tried Unreal, unity and so on but now Gdevelop is the one I stuck for 2D and game jam. It is a lot easier to understand with its spread sheet style coding. UE is a little bit overwhelming, and Unity needs to know programming (Don't really understand bolt even though it is visual scripting unlike UE).

The most underrated thing in the game industry is this channel.. really the best thing happen to game development ever!

Great review! Any thoughts on cocos creator?

Any engine with Java coding? What do you think of jMonkey ?

Nice, Gdevlop is great

And yes you have very nice game lyberis for different games, that is low level programming games, people when say low level thin about c++and game engines, no, making a game just from lybery, just try then you know how all works, and yes how always best channel for game developers journalism and other topics, keep going, its need, special in this “strange time”...keep going

RPG in a box I think it’s underrated

MORE PLEASE!!!!

You can also use physics and graphics libraries with MicroStudio. You can actually make 3D games with it. As for MicroScript, tbh I don't think it's that much like Lua. It borrows a bit of the syntax, but other than that it seems much closer to JS. Unfortunately, actual Lua in MicroScript is quite slow. Not by fault of the engine, but because the library that ports Lua to JS makes it slow. Even slower than the Python equivalent that MicroStudio uses. It's still usable, I guess, for less demanding games, but it's a bit of a bummer for a Lua lover like me. I end up coding in MicroScript, which is, apart from JS, the fastest choice... but it has quite a few unnecessary tripwires in its design that can get you bugs and headaches. Other than that -- and one or two things I disagree in its design -- I'm quite enjoying that engine. Many things only require a few clicks, like creating a project, sharing it with people, adding libraries to a project, etc. The sprite and map editors are still a underdeveloped, but that's only a matter of time. In many respects it's actually a brilliant engine.

CryENGINE is one of the most underrated engine out there

Have you ever tried/seen/heard of the C4 game engine?

What about Cryengine? :D must be really underated aswell ofc i think main reason nobody uses it is because the 5% royalty once u make 5k

Defold is a good choice 2D game projects

Also: Pico 8, Kaboom, and ctjs

Unity is definitely the most underrated engine. So many people cry about it. It's actually the best and most productive creative platform.

Mike, can you maybe cover 3D engines which are fastest for prototyping games. I find Unity3d’s component systeem way too slow and bloated for fast prototyping. I was disappointed at Godot for fast prototyping. And I’m talking fast, fast, fast, and easy. Fast and easy prototyping without bloat. Maybe a framework without editor might be faster, something like solar2d but then for 3d. I’m now trying Gdevelop, it has some nice things you can at fast, like controls, but I’m not sure if the event system is faster than coding, It might be slower. I think gamemaker was my fastest experience, but that was for 2D. I don’t know how easy and fast you can get a 3D environment running in gamemaker. Anyone else knows the best engine for fast prototyping?

Gdevelop is a revolutionary game engine.❤

Im using the Ursina Python Game Engine, with them im able to make a 3D Game like Crash Bandicoot and more ^^

I guess you can also add Unigine engine to this list.

> When you start the video talking about things that won't be in the video that are now necessarily in the video because you are talking about them IN the video.

I hope Renderware will become an popular engine for developer, especially for indie developer because, i think Renderware has a opportunity to become like a Unity and Unreal in the future.

Can you make video about easy to use picoCAD alternatives (free and opensource softwares)

Can you go in depth about usd files

Armory 3D and UPBGE!

MakeCode is like Scratch but it feels like more people know about Scratch

I like what MANU is doing.

Unigine is also an underrated Engine.

I found another game engine that isn't on this list, Castle Game Engine. It uses Pascel.

so many game engine, so little time..

It’s so sad when an otherwise interesting software is only online as a webapplet

Haha while I was watching the video I thought about recommending Janos's (a fellow Hungarian :) ) Wicked Engine XDDDD and lo and behold, it's in your compilation! XDDD Boy that engine has come a long way since I first saw it in 2017ish ! I think I'm gonna have to re-visit it to see if features I missed back then, maybe are now available.

What do you think about BuildBox?

Love hidden gems

show some love to Hazel also!

How bout cover some game libraries next? Like pygame or raylib or bevy for another video

DEFOLD !!!

GDevelop ❤

Here to rep CONSTRUCT 3 ❤️❤️❤️

I just want to point out that Game Maker the engine is free to use, what your paying for is just the ability to export to certain platforms, your not hindered with the engine itself. Also $50/yr is cheap af if all you care about is desktop, now $800/yr for consoles is great as well or you can simply use the monthly pricing as a 1 time export but even if it works 100$ on desktop there could be issues on console.

Love2D

1. GameMaker 2. Construct 3 3. Make & Code Arcade 4. Micro Studio 5. Defold 6. GDevelop 7. Wicked Engine 8. Flax Engine 9. Falco Engine You are welcome

no Stride?

Gdevelop good for artist like me.

Stencyl never seems to get much love. Not even sure if it's supported any more.

Soon or later O3de will be in top 10

I wonder why people are not talking about PlayCanvas game engine.

the spreadsheet aproach is the best for making games in a phone (gdevelop, construct)

love2d is a great game engine too :v but it has no editor

I have these 3 that I like 001 Game Creator AppGameKit Studio GDevelop 5

They're all well known, but anyway thank you for the video, it was fun and maybe some less nerdy guys than me didn't know about some of these.

Mani love your love about Microsoft! I can say maybe best corporation, and corporation who must learn from mistakes! You possibly remember phones with windows mobile systems, ah that is the time, but unix systems, you know enter with apple laptop, just work! But windows is a lot better, I must say.