Can I be the first to say:
NNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
I guess the writing was on the wall considering the game has been in development hell for many years, but I still look back at the original announcement trailer and think about how cool this game could have been. It was essentially sold as Minecraft but better - with proper combat, better exploration, powerful dedicated modding tools, and more. It was to be created by the creators of probably the biggest Minecraft server ever, which meant they understood the ins and outs of the game and what it needed to improve.
What a shame. At least we got Vintage Story.
…even after a major reboot of the game engine…
Custom engines claim another victim.
Game dev is hard. Game engines are apparently impossible and cost prohibitive these days, unless licensed out en masse. They’re killing studios and franchises left and right.
Moreover: changes that big go in the next game.
If you decide to roll your own engine, from the start… awesome. Especially when content-creation tools aren’t a huge deal, like if your game world is procedurally generated. Understand your scope, steal freely from existing libraries, avoid wasting your artists’ time.
If you try to switch engines mid-development, you are fucked. John Romero couldn’t make that shit work, just going from Quake to Quake II. Daikatana could have shipped before Half-Life and only missed colored lighting. Instead it’s a cautionary tale. Duke Nukem Forever didn’t even ship. They had a nearly-complete game, several times, but threw those out and started over.
You don’t have to throw anything out, to start a new project from scratch. Ship the damn game. Put different tech in the next one. If you don’t ship, there won’t be a next one.
Duke Nukem Forever did ship… Years late and it was a total mess of a decade’s worth of gimmick mechanics that killed the franchise, but it did make it out the door.
Still fits as a cautionary tale about switching engines, I just had to double check I didn’t hallucinate that game.
A game with that title shipped. I don’t think it was, in any sense, the same project. Not even as a ship-of-Theseus situation. A different studio started from scratch.
Duke Nukem Forever had wall-tits that you would slap and they give you health, and I’m pretty much going to remember that forever
Oh, I see what you mean, fair enough.
Totally agree. Make a game, not a game engine!
Though as an unrelated counterexample, Kitten Space Agency is doing a custom game engine and development is scary fast right now. They’re doing all the work in public and it’s wild how good the dev team is.
Sometimes there’s a rock hard justification. Orbital mechanics is a great one. Game engines are literally not built for physics at celestial scales.
KSA’s feature scope is way narrower than, say, a game with tons of NPCs and voxels and elaborate foilage and MMO-scale multiplayer and such. The DayZ guy and that studio are also pretty experienced at this point.
So yeah, I agree! And I’m glad KSA is seemingly progressing well, actually…
Noita and Exanima are also two great explanations of when to make your own custom game engine: when nothing else on the market does exactly what you need your engine to do.
Mismanaged out of existence. Should have just released, got some funds flowing, dealt with complaints, and then fixed them as time went on.
Shouldn’t have wasted all the time with a reboot of the engine, as that just further endangered them.
Really disappointed. Was gearing up to be a more complete game than Minecraft was. Could’ve been mod friendly out the gate too.
The silver lining is they didn’t steal people’s money with empty promises like TUG.
FUUUUUUUUUUCK wasz so lꝏkin forward to that game ‼️‼️‼️‼️💀
