If you have some time to spare and you have programming / 3D knowledge, i suggest to invest in a custom engine of yours.
Granted, it may take you more tme to build a workable engine but then the customization will be much faster.
You can use another 3rd party editor and such, no need to have them attached to engine and such. There are plenty of free libraries for everything, in this era you can just assemble anything you want and call it an engine, assuming the libraries are properly licensed.
If you don't have programming experience, i guess Unity and such solutions are faster in almost every aspect. Unreal i find it quite an overkill for a 2D game (even Unity i find an overkill). I find Unity games to have performance problems when they are not programmed properly.
If you invest on a 3rd party engine, be prepared to invest a lot of time in their forums for doing this or that and then you have some bugs which you may be unable to solve and also lose some time there as well. Never heard many good things about Unity support.
I find Unity solutions to be best when you are only striving for producting a game, not learning the technology behind it or becoming a better programmer and obviously when you don't want to code much. I am a long time programmer, invested lot of time in my own custom engine and i really hate editor-like engines like Unity or Unreal (lesser editing degree than Unity). Of course, you can find thousand people saying Unity is a must and i somewhat agree.
This is a new era.
Granted, it may take you more tme to build a workable engine but then the customization will be much faster.
You can use another 3rd party editor and such, no need to have them attached to engine and such. There are plenty of free libraries for everything, in this era you can just assemble anything you want and call it an engine, assuming the libraries are properly licensed.
If you don't have programming experience, i guess Unity and such solutions are faster in almost every aspect. Unreal i find it quite an overkill for a 2D game (even Unity i find an overkill). I find Unity games to have performance problems when they are not programmed properly.
If you invest on a 3rd party engine, be prepared to invest a lot of time in their forums for doing this or that and then you have some bugs which you may be unable to solve and also lose some time there as well. Never heard many good things about Unity support.
I find Unity solutions to be best when you are only striving for producting a game, not learning the technology behind it or becoming a better programmer and obviously when you don't want to code much. I am a long time programmer, invested lot of time in my own custom engine and i really hate editor-like engines like Unity or Unreal (lesser editing degree than Unity). Of course, you can find thousand people saying Unity is a must and i somewhat agree.
This is a new era.