Very much appreciate the feedback! Unreal is a monolith of an engine that's for sure and can be intimidating at first, but it's also a lot of fun to learn and extremely versatile once you begin to grasp how all the tools work.
Unity still does some things better though, especially in regards to anything 2D and just being more optimized out-of-the-box. Unreal can be just as optimized, but their optimization tools are a bit more sophisticated which tends to give them a bad rap since a lot of devs haven't learned how to properly optimize their games.
I'm sorry to hear you couldn't run it! What are your specs if you don't mind me asking? We avoided using nanite as much as possible since that tends to be a deal breaker on older GPUs, the grass is unfortunately the single instance of nanite we're using though.
We're also using lumen for GI/reflections as well since that's just the default nowadays, but we may try using static lighting instead and disable nanite altogether just to see if we can get it to run well on the Steam Deck.
I'm sorry to hear you weren't able to get the controls working properly! What type of controller are you using? and did Steam happen to be open while you were playing? When we were trying to get it working with PS5 controllers, we discovered that the inputs would get modified/consumed by Steam running in the background.
I also had to manually map the raw inputs to get PS5 controllers working natively, but each type of controller has different mappings that will need to be individually implemented (even the PS5 Edge controller doesn't work with the normal PS5 controller mappings). Please feel free to submit feedback or a bug report from the links included in the game folder, and hopefully we can get it working for you!
