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What Surprised Me About Switching from Unity to Unreal

· 3 min read
Yisi Liu
Yisi Liu
Game Developer

I'd been using Unity for two years when I decided to learn Unreal Engine for the Infinite Runner project. Here's what I expected, and what actually surprised me.

What I Expected​

  • A harder learning curve
  • "Better" graphics automatically
  • Everything to be different

What Actually Happened​

The Actor System Is Basically a MonoBehaviour​

Unity has MonoBehaviour. Unreal has AActor. Both are components attached to game objects that run every frame. The mental model transferred almost directly.

What is different: Unreal's ownership model. In Unity, game objects get destroyed and the garbage collector cleans up. In Unreal, you manage lifetime more carefully — TObjectPtr<>, weak references, and understanding when the engine owns vs. you own.

I hit my first crash because I held a raw pointer to an actor that got destroyed. Unity never taught me to think about this.

Blueprints First Was the Right Call​

Every guide I read said "learn C++ first, Blueprints are a crutch." I disagree — at least for a complete beginner to Unreal.

I prototyped the entire Infinite Runner movement system in Blueprints in a week. Then I ported it to C++ over the next week. Having a working Blueprint reference made the C++ translation much cleaner — I wasn't learning the engine API and solving gameplay design problems simultaneously.

Blueprints are also excellent for tweaking values. I kept the difficulty curve tuning in Blueprints (exposed variables) so I could adjust without recompiling.

Compile Times Are Real​

Unity is near-instant iteration. Unreal C++ builds take 30–120 seconds depending on change scope. This changes how you work:

  • Batch changes before compiling
  • Use hot reload where possible
  • Keep gameplay-tuning values in Blueprints or DataAssets so you're not compiling for value tweaks

After two weeks I stopped noticing the wait. But the first week was painful.

The Documentation Is... Different​

Unity's documentation is clearly written for people learning the engine. Unreal's documentation assumes you already know what you're looking for.

The community around Unreal is great, but it's weighted toward visual/Blueprint content. Finding C++ answers sometimes required reading source code or asking on the Unreal forums directly.

Six Months In​

I'm comfortable in both engines now. The things that felt alien in Unreal — the actor lifecycle, the build system, the C++ conventions — are now just normal.

The bigger lesson: the fundamentals transfer. State machines, object pooling, event systems, data separation — none of that is engine-specific. Understanding why patterns work makes picking up new engines much faster.

Yisi Liu — building the Infinite Runner in Unreal Engine 5.