ohthesetrees

Kelly

@ohthesetrees

Lovely lady into cute and cozy things, coffee, books, games, and music. Also lead engineer for Slime Rancher 2.

 

🏳️‍⚧️ Trans 🏳️‍🌈 Gay ♾️ Neurodivergent

 

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ohthesetrees
@ohthesetrees

Sometimes I wonder

if it's worth making my game from scratch. There are a lot of reasons why I want to (learning, full control, easier to maintain over the long term, etc) and lots of reasons not to (have to write a LOT of code to get an editor, graphics pipeline, input, etc).

I think I'll probably carry onward with my C++ codebase but I'm also going to start poking around with Godot 4 which seems like an interesting option in case I decide to move to an engine. It's open source so at least theoretically maintainable/extensible for anything I need while already have a bunch of stuff done for me.

Of course Unreal is always interesting but I'm still just not over the hill of initial understanding which makes it feel somewhat impenetrable. But Blueprints are definitely nice!

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Serbaayuu
@Serbaayuu

Godot has been really easy for me. I've quite regularly complained about not being able to do something and then looked it up and found a 1-line or 1-button that does the thing I was complaining about not being able to do.

If you already have any experience in code I highly recommend at least checking it out. And their documentation is pretty good too so it's easy to find answers without screwing around on obscure forums.

I'm still on Godot 3 though. Kind of scared to try upgrading to 4.

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MxAshlynn
@MxAshlynn

This is a real quandary for me. The trouble I run into is that there's no off-the-shelf engine that caters to all of my wants/needs well enough, but it is very challenging getting enough code under your belt to go it alone

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ohthesetrees
@ohthesetrees

Very challenging, especially for 3D. I used XNA for Shipwreck but C++/OpenGL for Polychromatic. But since it was still 2D and relatively simple in graphics and audio it wasn’t too bad.

I also have probably unreasonable desires for having things work exactly how my brain wants them too, which can make it hard to work in engines that don’t do that. 😅

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MxAshlynn
@MxAshlynn

Oh that's cool! I started out on XNA and am thinking of going back and giving FNA a whirl in the not-too-distant future.

I really want to stay with 2D games, and almost all major engines these days treat them as an afterthought (Godot, Unity, Unreal).

I am also considering giving GameMaker 2 a try, since they are very 2D focused....

I feel like I'm actually pretty flexible when it comes to how things work? Not sure. But, I have been bitten so many times by the difficulty in maintaining a game built on someone else's engine.

This is extra true if you are publishing to mobile or console, where you often have no choice but to update to a new version of the engine when the platform holders want you to. All too often even minor-version-number updates lead to many hours of changes and many more testing when something subtle in how the engine works under the hood is altered :/

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ohthesetrees
@ohthesetrees

FNA is nice. I moved Shipwreck to FNA after Xbox Live Indie Games went away so we only had one code base for all desktop computers (before that we used XNA on Windows and FNA elsewhere which was a hassle).

If I were doing 2D games I'd probably go it on my own in C++ with OpenGL or D3D11. It's definitely a bit of work to set up some things, but I think overall it's not as hard to get into and you end up with total control and ability to port to whatever platforms you want. Alternatively there's SDL (which has some 2D rendering functionality) or SFML (which has a bit more stuff built in) if you want to leverage some higher level libraries.

I've also heard good things about raylib but I've never used it myself.

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MxAshlynn
@MxAshlynn

Oh yes, RayLib seems really cool! I've also considered that, but I think I would only do that if I was using C or something similar. I'm still not a huge fan of C++, but I should probably get back into it just because it's so ubiquitous.

Regarding OpenGL, does that still have much support? I was wondering if it had been replaced by by Vulcan?

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