I used Unity 2019.3.3f1 for Morfosi and Renpy 7.2.0 for Vincent: The Secret of Myers .
But tbh, I prefer the 2018 Unity more. The 2019 version acts funky on macOS from time to time.
For 2D games, I much prefer using C++ because most premade 2D engines do this weird thing where they either come up with their own scripting language or using something weird like Javascript. For 3D games, I don't feel like doing all the 3D math myself, + Unity and Unreal use C# and C++ respectively, which is nice.
I used Unity for over ten years (almost everything I have here is in Unity) but I want to try other tools, thinking of porting HyperBowl to Unreal this year. I'd like to try Godot, but I don't think it has much FBX support. I did use Unreal a long time ago, back when they had Unrealscript, and also CryEngine.
I've made my last two games with JavaScript/HTML using libraries like Three.js, A-Frame, and Cannon.js. My two published games before that were made in UE4. I've made a few prototypes/small games in other engines including Unity and Godot.
I generally focus on 3D games and I really prefer UE4 over any of the other big name engines. With some of the latest announcements for UE5 it just further cements it's position as the best engine for anything other than prototypes or web games/2D games IMO. Plus they give away so much amazing free maketplace content!
Unity just feels way too clunky to me in terms of the UI and general use. It feels like they just focus on releasing new undocumented/unfinished features to catch up with Unreal instead of polishing what they have. I like the spirit of Godot but after playing with it have no desire to use it for actual development.
There are some exceptions, but most of my games are written in C using a home-made engine/framework libsuperderpy based on Allegro 5.
Irreplaceable toolset: Qt Creator, GIMP, Audacity, Inkscape, beepbox.co, Hydrogen, GitLab CI, Docker (for multi-platform CI builds), gdb, clang-tidy, sanitizers and Python + Qt for self-made utils (animation editor/converter etc.).
I’ve made my own programming language, specifically for video games. It’s called avdl
(Abstract video-game development language), and is currently open-sourced here: https://notabug.org/tomtsagk/avdl
It is drawing 3D graphics, and currently can compile for Linux and Windows.
As others have said, I feel the popular game engines out there do not give me as much control over a project as I’d be comfortable. The same amount of time that I spend learning one of them, is the same amount of time I spend developing my language, which gives me as much control as I need over a project.
I use Clickteam Fusion 2.5 for all my games. (Have been for six years)
I use C/C++ and Assembly when I try to make extensions for Fusion (See I said try, because I'm not all that good LOL XD)
Audacity and LMMS for Audio.
GIMP/Paint.net/Inkscape/Various pixel art makers for art.
And a stupid, drugged up brain for ideas and work stuff :/