I have been in the middle of a move, my old landlord sold the property and so me and my flatmate were forced to find somewhere else. Since February 11th until now I've been out of a proper home/not had any internet, thankfully I'm up and running again now. I still don't have my desktop set up properly but I can work on my MacBook for now until everything is sorted.
I haven't been doing completely nothing, for an interim period I was staying at one of my friends houses I did manage to do a bit of playing around with various commerical game engines. This is a preliminary step as me and my friend (Ash: https://ashleighthomas.wordpress.com/) are hoping to start developing a game together.
Leadwerks
The main pitfalls I found with Leadwerks is that the Editor is not actually that easy to work with and there doesn't seem to be as large a user base as most of the other commercial engines out there. The one aspect that I did like about Leadwerks is that it was a one off payment which I have always preferred to a subscription based payment method.
Unity
One pitfall I did have with Unity is that there were a lot of featured that were not readily available to "Free" users. Features such as Deferred Rendering, Variance Shadow Mapping and Post Processes. Okay so I could probably live without all these but it just felt as though the real potential was taken away unless I wanted to fork out $1500.
So quit my yabbering on as this has now changed! As of a few days ago Unity announced Unity 5,
which now features it's same $100,000 or more profit and you have to pay for a licence. The difference is that you now get all the engine features which I think is an absolute game changer (mind the pun). Unity has proven to be one of the leading game engines, but with this new full engine for free and it's massive user base I believe there is a good chance they will be running away from the competition.
I think me and Ash have decided that Unity is going to be the way to go for our game, mainly for it's massive amount of online help content and the fact that it has proven to be an effective game engine for many indie developers.
Unreal Engine
Engine Conclusion
Project Work
Cheers :)