TERATOMA is an ongoing gamedev project; a third person survival horror/action/exploration game about exploring the mysterious pit under your apartment complex while you lose your humanity in degrees.
it's been rattling around in my head in different incarnations for the last decade, and i've been putting serious work into it for the last few months. i want to get it into a form that other people can play by this time next year, at the latest. right now i am trying to keep scope-creep down to a minimum and focus on getting a playable "moving around and attacking enemies feels nice" skeleton done before i add a lot of mechanical bells & whistles.
i will (hopefully) be posting regular updates through the coming weeks.
development on the underlying engine, player character movement & projectile pooling/handling was more-or-less finished. now that's out with the bathwater because lmao even if they walk back all the shit they proposed today, it is still a profoundly bad idea to do business with Unity or trust anything made on their platform as a source of revenue.
Unreal is overkill by a few orders of magnitude. its editor takes up most of the space on my SSD (and makes my old CPU chug), and learning C++/manual garbage collection is a very steep uphill when you're barely fluent in C#.
Godot would be my first choice... except its support for 3D is still pretty anemic (its 3D physics handler is somehow worse than unity's, it doesn't support deferred lighting, and as of 4.1 it still doesn't have working 3D inverse kinematics -- good luck getting player character to aim her gun where you point the camera). FOSS rules when it has the features you need; when it doesn't, you could find yourself waiting a decade for someone to make that functionality their new pet-project.
Unity sucked but nothing was better than Unity for the sort of shit i make. the dream was to make something that could pass as a particularly ambitious PS2 game, and that's been the dream since they were still making PS2 games. everything but Unity was either overkill or underkill (and even Unity approached the former in the last few years, though it still kept its core functionality and ease of use). i worked with that engine for eight years, and got to the level of competency where if i thought of some feature or functionality, i could sit with it for an afternoon or two and make it real. i really hope those skills are transferable.
anyway, look forward to Teratoma, coming [????] to [?????]