What game engine would you recommend to an indie developer? The type who can't afford a fucking server to run the bloated and buggy unity editor but is actually a developer so isn't afraid of typing.
I've had enough of the improper sandboxing (will crash bc of game scripts), tempfile-based crash-unaware instance tracking (won't restart afterwards) and lack of UI scaling (seriously, that's like accessibility/retina support basics) that is the unity editor. If they had command line tools I'd use them happily.

@Jilano godot is awesome!

If your game idea is simple enough, just roll your own using SDL (for 2D) or OpenGL for 3D. It really isn't that hard and more.than good enough for simpler stuff.

... bloated unity editor? what the hell are you talking about, i ran unity 2018 on hp630 laptop and worked on it for 2 months. it was a pain, but doable, and also hp630 is a decade old machine weaker than my phone.

I use game engines like Unreal or Unity and on server I don't do that. So what are you talking about?

@KDSBest The editor, and how it requires a server machine to load all the stuff that I wouldn't even need because it's for another scene, and how it then freezes up for no apparent reason the moment I try to run my game. And when I've almost accepted that I'll have to wait another 15 minutes before starting work I learn that its unwilling to open the project "because it's open" despite the fact that I've killed every process vaguely resembling unity, so now I gotta reboot to get rid of just the right tempfiles out of a hundred meaningless names deleting any of which can be fatal.

Raw OpenGL.

@Lor-inc what do you mean it requires a server? I can run Unity on a Surface 3 without anywhere near the experience you're describing. Unity doesn't require much to run at all.

Unity is more lightweight than half the Excel files I have to open in a day. I'm not sure what you're experiencing, but I get the feeling Unity isn't the problem. Worst case, whatever is slowing things down will just affect the next engine you try, too.

I have been using Unity professionally until a year ago and, even though it's not the best editor ever, it's far from what you describe. I'd always recommend unity to indie developers bcs it's super easy to learn and use and also quite intuitive. UE4 on the other hand has a much steeper learning curve if you want to do stuff properly. Been using it daily for over a year and I still have ti dig into the engine code every week or two.

yeah unity 8s nice but lets be real... youll need budget no matter what