Game Journal #126 - Goodbye Unreal Engine 5
GAME JOURNALS
HaxDev
5/29/2026
Hello everyone! It's been a long time since my last game journal. In fact, it's been almost a year...ish. Isn't that crazy. The reasons are vast, but the most pertinent was:
Game development was no longer fun.
Or to be more specific, game development in Unreal Engine was no longer fun. Every time I even thought about opening Unreal, waiting 10 minutes for my project to open (and if you leave it open too long sometimes things just corrupt,) the editor lagging like crazy despite me having 64 gigs of ram, me having to recode things that I made earlier when I was more inexperienced, I just put it off. The experience was just not good. And Unreal itself was not good. At least, for me and what I wanted.
Let's start from the beginning. I conceptualized the idea for Joe Maverick in mid 2018, right after I beat the game Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE. I'd wanted to play another game just like it, but there weren't any (I thought.) So I came up with my own idea. Took ~2 years to make some basic lore and character designs, and by 2021 I was ready to choose a game engine to learn. At the time, Unreal Engine 4 was the best choice as it was free, and had no royalties up until your first million dollars. It also had the best realtime 3D graphics, which I was certain my game was going to be.
A bit later in my journey Unreal Engine 5 came out. I wish I never updated. But I did, because my project was still very early-on, and updates ALWAYS improve a product, right? Wrong. My game immediately ran 10x worse. You can even see for yourself, the Unreal Engine 4 version of my game is available under Demo. That version I could run on my laptop, my home pc, and even my college's 8gig ram pcs without issue. As soon as I went to 5, only my home pc could run it, and even then it wasn't the best experience. Many gamers have said that Unreal Engine 5 games run terribly, and I agree. As much as I love Expedition 33, it lagged quite a bit even on the lowest settings.
But I stuck with Unreal because it was what I learned. I would just deal with the drawbacks... but the game landscape kept changing. Now almost every game used Unreal Engine 5, and people had gotten tired of the engine, how it ran, how the games looked. It was hard to disagree.
Just one of many anti-Unreal memes.
So with all this building up over the years, along with me playing a vast variety of games that did NOT need insane graphics to be good, I just lost interest in Unreal. I wanted to jump ship. But to where? Unity was infamously anti-consumer, Godot was decent but was still lacking a lot, RPG maker was good but has very limited features. I felt stuck, and as a result game development stalled.
Then, recently, I found this new engine called RPG Architect. What drew me in was the tiny filesize and RAM requirements. Just look. When was the last time ANY application you used asked for 2 gigabytes of RAM to run it?
Just beautiful. Way better than the 80 gigabytes Unreal wants just to have the engine on my PC. I can't wait to uninstall it.
I've played the demo project a bit and liked it so far. So, this is likely the engine I'm using for the game. I won't say it's 100%, but for now I'm going to play around with it and see if I like it.
As for the Unreal Engine version of the game... I'll archive it by putting it under the Demo category. Obviously the saves and etc won't be compatible with the new version. But yeah.
All right, I should be back into making these semi-regularlyish. Next update will probably be me messing around with the engine and seeing if I want to commit to it.
Also, HTML Comment Box is giving me a 502 Bad Gateway, so no comments section this time. Lol.