I am trying to program a chess board. Which would be the least time consuming? Learning Unity Programming or Blender Programming?
As far as I know, it’s not too difficult to learn the basics of the API’s use by both the BGE and Unity.
But either way, it will take a lot of practice and general reading up on API information and techniques to become skilled to the level where you can create something like polished chess game logic or pretty much any type of AI with that level of complexity and skill.
Depending on what engine you use, you might want to either hit the Blender API reference along with Python.org or all the resources and documentation you can find around the Unity site.
My opinion is heavily biased, because I’ve used Unity < 1 week, and blender about 5 years.
From my brief experience, I found that Unity was somewhat bloated and unstable.
And for a chess game, it has nothing that blender doesn’t. Unless there’s a platform you need to support.
If you already know Python, I would go with Blender.
If you’re wanting to build a chess MMO with Linux support restricted to a monolithic exporter, go with Unity.
If you’re wanting a lightweight 2D chess game, I would pursue other options.
Of course, folks on the Unity forum might have something else to say.
Edit: To answer your question, I believe blender would be less time consuming (at least for me).
In fact if you’re wanting to cheat, there’s already several implementations of chess with Python. You could probably adapt them to your needs.
Like has been said, the concept of the game of chess is a difficult game to make in itself - whatever engine you use probably won’t really hinder your progress. The main problem will be in either programming the AI to be smart, or tying in a library to perform the logic for you (assuming there is, say, a Python chess game AI library).
As SolarLune and others said, the logic will be the greatest obstacle. The difficulty will vary depending on your programming skills.
By the way, you should not only choose engine depending one factor, there’re a lot of other factors to take into consideration, like platform reach or team experience and so on.
The game logic for chess is pretty generic, regardless of the engine used; if you know a language already, I’d go with that. If you’ve never programmed chess then I’d pick something else if you are learning the language and/or engine.