Both Unity and Unreal Engine have spots in our roundup of the best game development software. Unity remains the most-used single game engine overall, but Unreal is increasingly popular for big 3D titles.
Developer Epic Games has been trying to coax more indie devs to Unreal by providing a lot of resources for learning, stressing that the engine isn't just for big photorealistic games. Its latest helping hand is its Parrot Game Sample, which it's made in both Unreal Engine and Unity using the same assets.
Created with the game studio Secret Dimension, Parrot Game Sample is a charming, pirate-themed 2.5D platformer with three levels, a title screen and a full menu system. There are two versions, one made in Unreal Engine 5 and one made in Unity 6. The goal was to achieve maximum parity between the two versions and capture their insights along the way in annotations and documentation offering tips and education for developers.
Parrot shows implementations of input, lighting, shaders, materials, audio, character controllers, physics, and management systems. Specific Unreal Engine systems in use include Lumen for global illumination, Nanite for higher poly meshes, Behavior Trees for enemy AI, World Partition for level streaming, Sequencer for the swimming sharks, Unreal Motion Graphics (UMG) and CommonUI for the user interface and Enhanced Input.
You can see clear differences in the Unity vs Unreal Engine 5 versions below.
Devs Dakota Herold and Justin Thomas have aimed to make the code in UE5 as simple as they could. They also created an ancillary set of documents that expands on several topics, including more thorough explanations on concepts, Unreal Engine systems, Parrot’s implementations, and references to the official Unreal Engine documentation.
Both versions of Parrot Game Sample can be downloaded from Epic Games' Fab store for free.
For more Unreal Engine-related news, check out the first images from the Rogue Trooper movie, which was animated entirely in Epic's game engine.
