Engine Switching for Senior Project

Lately (the past two months or so) I've been busy working on my senior project which is a 16 week course that involves myself and my team of 5 other people making a game within that time. As I mentioned in my previous post we were making it in C# using the XNA framework. After the first half of the project (the first 8 weeks) we realized how difficult it was to create something in the scope of what we wanted with our limited experience and our limited time. The day I got back from my two week break from school, which was after the first 8 weeks, I sat down with my other programmer and we realized that we were running into too many problems. If we continued down that path we would most likely not finish the project or even come close due to some major problems with loading our assets and using said assets.
So we decided right then and there, after discussing with the rest of the team, that we wanted to switch to Unity3d which from what we heard was easy to use. The other team in the class was using it so we were able to see what they were capable of, and so we sort of figured that we should use it as well and try to make a better polished product with less time, given that Unity3d was so simple to use. After about the first week of using it, it was the first time for all of us, from what I'm aware of,  we realized that it was very easy to use and that we were able to recreate just about everything we had done in 8+ weeks in just that one week. Either we're just that talented, or Unity3d was just that simple to use. For those noobie game developers out there looking for a starting point, I recommend using Unity3d, if you want to make a fully 3D game. Though if you're like me, you would probably prefer something a little more programming oriented and challenging. In that case, XNA is a good place to start, it's definitely easier to work with than DirectX or OpenGL in C++ for example, but it is still more challenging than Unity3d, and you'll probably have a larger sense of pride for what you've created over Unity3d because you probably put more effort into it. Though, that's just me.

Hopefully I'll get around to posting more about my endeavor's and whatnot now that my project is less burdening and I'm getting closer to graduation, five and a half weeks actually.

~ RogueTemplar (a.k.a Icedmetal57)