- Validate the idea. Try building a prototype and verifying your idea before comitting to it. You'll learn a lot about whether your game idea is fun/can be made fun, and learn the ropes of your new dev environment in a way that'll let you throw away your early code with no regrets.
- Pick Unity if you don't have experience with either. You'll get to results faster, and at solo dev scale, the quality Unreal offers won't matter.
- If you've decided on a mobile game, do some research on how effective monetization on mobile works, come to terms with how bad the options are and decide if you're still into it
- Runway seems OK for what you're doing, but word of advice: it is mentally taxing to some people to be in financial "freefall". I know this hit me hard when I made a similar decision to yours.
That said, there are a lot of good parts as well. Seeing people play and enjoy your brainchild is definitely more rewarding than working somebody else's startup or company, and as a venue for creativity, game development is hard to beat for somebody with a programmer skillset.
I wrote a game with a friend early on for the App Store. I second the notion of validation. It's great you have a friend who can design graphics for the game, but prototype and test the basic mechanics before you get too wrapped up in the appearance. Using simple placeholders will speed up your iteration as you refine the mechanics. I spent a lot of time writing a vector graphics layer (this was in the days of iOS 2), and while it was very cool, it took a lot of time that could probably have been better spent trying experiments with the basic gameplay. The game was not a big success.
- Validate the idea. Try building a prototype and verifying your idea before comitting to it. You'll learn a lot about whether your game idea is fun/can be made fun, and learn the ropes of your new dev environment in a way that'll let you throw away your early code with no regrets.
- Pick Unity if you don't have experience with either. You'll get to results faster, and at solo dev scale, the quality Unreal offers won't matter.
- If you've decided on a mobile game, do some research on how effective monetization on mobile works, come to terms with how bad the options are and decide if you're still into it
- Runway seems OK for what you're doing, but word of advice: it is mentally taxing to some people to be in financial "freefall". I know this hit me hard when I made a similar decision to yours.
That said, there are a lot of good parts as well. Seeing people play and enjoy your brainchild is definitely more rewarding than working somebody else's startup or company, and as a venue for creativity, game development is hard to beat for somebody with a programmer skillset.