Project Goals

My ultimate goal is to produce a simple 3D maze game featuring keys and locked doors, the twist on that formula being the inclusion of tameable monster companions – and the locks for some doors will in fact be stat checks for the monsters. For example, accessing one part of the maze may require a companion with a high “climbing” stat to reach a lever.

Although this will make up the game side of the experience, the main draw of the project to me will be in collecting and having fun with the recruitable monsters. The main inspiration comes from the Chao Gardens featured in Sonic Adventure 1 & 2.

Problem

I'm deciding between Unity and Unreal Engine based on how achievable the following is:

What matters most to me is constructing creatures that feel fun to watch and with recognisable distinguishing features. Exact size and scale should be somewhat randomised, some would have bigger heads or longer legs for example. Where I run into issues is in how to manipulate meshes or bones to make a creature look unique. For example, I would like to semi randomise horn length and shape such as in the examples below:

I would also like to swap out particular body parts without that interfering with animations, for example swapping standard legs for ones with webbed feet and having the walk animation continue to work.

Initial Goal

My first milestone will be to produce a basic creature with randomised physical attributes within a narrow spectrum. Whenever the simulation starts, a different (only slightly modified) creature will be generated and the walk animation should play regardless.

I'm new to this forum, if there's anything I should do to reorganize this post please let me know. In the future I'll also be more specific with issues I'm having, but in this case my main issue is in identifying which engine best suits my aims and a few particular issues I don't know how to resolve.

Thanks for reading, I'll try to improve and I'm open to answering any questions.

@Rutin Thanks for the response, I've used unity quite a bit - but I struggled in particular with the problem regarding swapping out body parts. I came to a complete dead end with no idea how to continue. Since then I started with Unreal Engine but kept running into little issues that kept putting me off, possibly down to a faulty installation to be fair as I was following a tutorial but still getting errors.

My hope for this thread is that someone has worked with either of these engines and attempted similar things as I am aiming to do, the worst case scenario I'm trying to avoid in particular is sticking to one engine and finding later that I'm fighting upstream with a limitation imposed on me by my choice of engine.

Maybe that's a silly concern, I do recognise that these are extremely flexible engines used by professionals. If anyone has a good argument for using one engine over another for this kind of project - great. If not, well I can put my mind at rest with fewer doubts in my mind. I know I put a few different questions in one thread, next time I make a thread on this forum I'll limit it to one and provide more specific context.