Yes, unreal is quite easy to get started in. You start with a scaffolding immediately when you start a new project. It literally has template options for different game types. It’s very friendly to artists as nearly all the art tools are gui driven. Blueprints are okay, I didn’t love them for all things but for a lot of things it was okay. Code is harder, you have to read their implementations of things if you want to do anything sufficiently complex. There’s not a lot of comprehensive technical material for the internals. Using unreal engine as a programmer feels like the using “enterprise” software in terms of scale and bloat except that it was built by seriously competent engineers.
easy to get in but way tougher to finish a product. You are literally stuck to using forums and dealing with out of date and incomplete C++ documentation which is a non-starter for anybody without gaming dev experience. You really can't rely on blueprints alone, and it feels way more work than it should be for simple things you could just write in C# in Unity.
Unity isn't exactly perfect either, there's just confusion about which version to start out on but the one that has the most amount of tutorials and userbase seems to be the answer.
Absolutely correct that UE C++ is daunting. You just have way too much responsibility and you absolutely need experience with C++. It also takes more developers who are harder to find compared to Unity devs.
Unreal Engine really isn't it for indie or small studios. It just takes so much longer to make something on it, and you almost certainly end up working with C++ to fix performance issues, debugging, etc.
For large studios especially film studios using it to create 3D environments? It's perfect and those are UE's target market since they are guaranteed to have revenue income that can pay UE since it works on percentage of revenue generated and small studios, indie devs, the risk is far greater.
This symmetric financial incentives mean the indie, small studios are always sidelined as they don't pay the bills. That's where Unity really shines.
One of the things I saw when playing with it is that they emphasize searching and intellisense reliant style programming with autocomplete, ie, make a guess and let intellisense tell you the object/type/whatever you're playing with. So you don't technically have to read their implementations, if you know how to leverage intellisense properly. In fact Microsoft specifically sped up intellisense with Unreal Engine (but the changes affect all intellisense users): https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/18x-faster-intellisen...
> Is there any good engine made for programmers? A kind of "bootstrap" of video games?
There's so many starter kits out there, for Unity at least, even for older platforms such as Ogre3D and SDL, that I think the highest barrier of entry for any programmer is the fun idea.
