[rtpg]

Unity suffers from being 3d by default (so you're kind of defaulted into "physics-activated 3d world" stuff), having very low discoverability of features, and a lot of googling to land on the Unity forums.

If you're a programmer, there are a couple ways you can experience happiness:

- Try one of the many "2d game library" things. They tend to be limited to playing sound, displaying gfx, and handling input. But if you're a programmer that will at least give you an idea of what is implemented and what isn't.

- Use Unreal with Blueprints. "But I'm a programmer, let me write code!" Trust me, when you are using blueprints you both get a much more discoverable API, and can actually get all the fancy built-in 3d stuff to work. Also if you're not working on something by yourself, suddenly other people can help out a lot.

- Use Game Maker Studio! Being a programmer means you might have some more systems thinking, but ultimately having stuff like tile editors easily means you're not going to spend a month building out your own little tools.

Programming everything from scratch is overrated if you actually want to make something that works. But Unity has a lot of half-baked features and is actually pretty hard to get working nicely for so many things that it can easily end up being a massive source of incidental complexity.

[lastangryman]

Obligatory Godot shout out which unlike Unity had has "native" 2D support and is a pleasure to work in.