What's easy to use is pretty subjective. As a game developer, you're already at least a step or two removed from the proverbial average computer user. I suggest downloading live images of a few different distros and desktop environments, and playing with each for a while to get a feel for the differences.

I'm a gamer and developer, too. KDE Plasma is my desktop of choice these days.

I need to be able to use Unreal Engine

Someone else asked about this just 8 days ago, here:

https://beehaw.org/post/21209323

Regarding that particular requirement:

The Unreal Engine for Linux page indicates that they offer pre-compiled builds for Ubuntu 22.04.

It's possible that those pre-compiled builds might work on Linux Mint, since Mint is based on Ubuntu. I would probably try this before committing to the officially supported Ubuntu version, both because it's nice to have a newer distro and because Mint has a good track record of avoiding Ubuntuisms that are not generally well received (e.g. Snap).

If you don't mind some extra work, you can apparently build Unreal for other linux distros. See here:
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/linux-development-quickstart-for-unreal-engine