The game jam is finally over, what a hectic 10 days. This was my first game jam done in UE5, but I'm realising for game jams it's super handy to be able to embed the gameplay into the browser window. What engines did you guys use, and what do you think is the best?
Congrats to everyone who got their submissions in btw, we made Tomo's Tiny Adventure, and I'll be playing as many as I can! ♥
Hi! Best is subjective, but i do think for jams godot is just better. I've used UE for a long time (i quit it and i'm happier than i ever was). For jams it is just bad, cause of no web support and the awfully long build times. I can't say much about unity cause i only made a couple of simple games in it. And the godot's 2 features that put it on the top step are: Builds in couple of seconds (like no joke 3 seconds for the build), so it allows for super fast iterations (and the iterartion process is very dast already cause the engine is built with it in mind), when my friends were playtesting, i was live pumping out new builds with bug fixes they found, and balance changes. And the second thing that makes it great - it runs great in web, the load times are way faster than unity's and i feel like it makes player experience much better. There is one problem with it, it's the lag on the first time you use a visual effect but it's fixable by just loading up fx in the background.
Whoa, 3 seconds for a build?! That's crazy. I've never used Godot but those reasons make me want to try it for the next one, makes the playtesting loop way faster and that's half the battle when you're trying to test for a game jam. It get's nail bitingly stressful in UE5 when the building takes so long every time haha. I see your game was made in Godot, do you know if it works just as great for 3D games?
I used Unreal and made my game in about a day so it's super simple but at least has a working loop (https://itch.io/jam/gamedevtv-jam-2025/rate/3586441). After last year's experience where I learned what you pointed out (for game jams people just want to play in a browser, fast iteration times matter), this year I implemented in BluePrints and focused a lot more on the fundamentals so whatever the outcome I've learned something new. Blueprints really helped with quickly prototyping stuff and the wide variety and huge amount of assets and ready-made samples available for UE helped building and learning although implementing it into one's own projects is still a lot of work. I'd consider jams more of an opportunity to learn and try new things in that sense although clearly it's possible to create amazing things too once you get a good handle on scope, tooling and dev process.
As a programmer and considering general access to game jam games I've come to prefer Godot for game james published to itch. As a job and in general life I like using and learning UE and my first jam I did in Unreal but it's harder to get people to play because downloading is risky plus it's not as good for 2D games, So for that reason I've shifted to Godot for these jams . Last year we (my partner and I) did a 2D game in Godot and this year we tried 3D using gdscript for the first time and I feel it went pretty successfully. If you want to see what we managed to do for the jam our game is: https://audhumbla.itch.io/pineroot-hollow
- Unity: I can't comment on Unity, I know it's popular but I havent used it in years. Unity does 2d and 3d. I believe it can do all platforms it definitely does in browser.
- Godot 2D and 3D: works on all platforms - it's programming is kinda python OR you could use C#. The builds are quick an the sizes are usually really small (but depends on you as the dev). Our project for this jam is about 170mb in size total.
- Unreal: is the best for 3D but no real 2D and no html support, build sizes out of the box are usually massive unless you know what to disable I would say like half a gig is easy for Unreal builds pushing up to a gig depending on the game.
We are a two person team and we have used UE in the past. Our first game for game jam was on Unreal Engine, but it lacks good web support so we decided to try to create our own little "engine" on C++ to participate in game jams and maybe eventually be able to create larger games for Steam. We are only using some small libraries like sokol, jolt, raudio, entt.
So far our engine does not even have GUI and we are basically just using Blender for level design loading a whole game with one gltf file.
Our game for this jam is: https://nesobaka.itch.io/fragments
Two last games are also created using our engine for other game jams in this month
We used UE5, because it's what we know, but not being able to make a browser playable game definitely hurts your exposure.
Next Jam I intend to use SFML3 and a custom framework, mostly because I miss making games from scratch.
Here's our game: https://itch.io/jam/gamedevtv-jam-2025/rate/3588438
I also rated yours earlier, very impressive.
