I can't say I'm particularly stoked on the direction the art style has taken, really.
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Eh?You are not someone else.
It's a shame that it'll only ever be a single player game. Imagine the kind of sandbox MMO it could be.
What Went Wrong:
- Lack of focus. I bounced between many areas for a couple reasons. One reason was trying to work out deals with investors. There were a handful of significant deals that came my way but only two of them ate up any considerable amount of time. Each person that has come to me has asked for something different and most of these things I could justify as features in the long run for the engine (even if they did not have immediate priority). To be clear, this was my mistake, not the fault of any investor. Unfortunately it has gotten to the point that I am now fearful to engage with investors at all even though I could definitely use the funding. Overall, these were minor setbacks though. A bigger setback was bouncing between ideas personally. I was fearful that pursuing something ambitious was a bad idea for the short term and thought I should just pump out a prototype game as fast as possible. This led to a further lack of focus as this idea changed multiple times (based on community input and otherwise). At first it was going to be a multiplayer game (hence the networking I added in). Ultimately I decided that there is one game that I really want to build, and that was in the vein of my original vision. It does not mean that it can't be fun in the short term, or that it will take any longer to release something in the short term.
- Feature creep. I constantly found myself thinking system xyz was not good enough (and maybe it was not). I kept adding in features without a clear goal, just that I would "probably need them." I don't doubt that everything I added will be useful, but prioritizing is key. Believe or it not I have been well aware of this issue for a long time, and even in spite of my best intentions I found myself getting caught up in these problems. Often in adding some gameplay aspect I found some feature necessary. Admittedly, it is quite a different thing if you are working with a prebuilt engine and most of the functionality you need is right there.
- Being concerned with mass appeal. Yes, I need to sell copies, but I should not throw everything on the altar just to do it. Ultimately, if I am not making the game that I want to, I will lose passion. And if I don't make a game with targeted appeal, the odds are equally against me.
What Went Right:
I don't have the greatest feedback mechanisms but it seems people are generally happy and impressed with my work so far. Somehow things are all coming together in the code, in ways I would not expect. I had never written a fluid simulator, yet it turned out well. I had never written a character animation system, but I was pleased with the results. I had never written a networking client or server (beyond trivial examples), yet somehow I did it (even though it is a simple TCP deterministic architecture, it was not trivial to write). I guess if nothing else, I have gained faith that I can tackle pretty much any task, given enough time.
Other than that, not really sure what to put here. There are plenty of ups and downs, but I remain confident in the outcome of the future.
Several reasons:
- Why a custom engine?
- My ultimate goal is to empower *individuals* to create stuff. Not teams of 5 to 300 skilled people - software already exists for that. I want it to be easy for a single person to create something cool, and there is a gap in the spectrum. In the low end, you have things like Minecraft - extremely approachable, and its allows a lot of creative freedom, but the flexibility is rather limited. On the high end there is Unity, Unreal, etc - the sky is the limit, but so is the learning curve and manpower required. In the middle I think there exists a gap for people to work within acceptable constraints and produce content really fast - be it games, or movies, or animations, or whatever. Normal people won't go and pick up an engine. But they will pick up an engine disguised as a game.
lack of focus
I want to make a prediction: This will never be a finished game.
I'm actually OK with that. I always expected this and backed because I wanted to support the guy working on an extravagant engine.
But I don't see that this is ever going to be more than a tech demo of an extravagant engine.
Don't like the way this is looking. The terrain generated looks much too bumpy and mountainous, there are annoying repeating patterns of snow-mud and stone-grass transitions, patches of mud or stone framed by the other material basically, the placeholder character and weapon art looks so bad I wonder why you even show it, animations are shit, combat doesn't look like fun and so on.
And where are all the lighting and other effects from the early demos, this looks nearly Daggerfall overworld kind of bad right now. But I guess I don't have the full picture, this seems like a very technical Kickstarter progress report to show that some milestone (real time rendering of vast areas?) is reached, right?
You know it looked much better when it was isometric and was supposed to imitate pixel art aesthetics.
And the downside is that you're reinventing the wheel inside your engine for animations? You can take it further and do the same for particles, sounds, etc etc.The upside to this is that it makes it more flexible for the average user to produce stuff in-game, without having to know some complex modeling program.
Btw, what happened to the advanced emergent AI part of the game?
And the downside is that you're reinventing the wheel inside your engine for animations? You can take it further and do the same for particles, sounds, etc etc.The upside to this is that it makes it more flexible for the average user to produce stuff in-game, without having to know some complex modeling program.
If I get it right, you're not going to do a multiplayer game and you're not ever going to share your engine with people? If that's correct, there's no need for DIY animation code. And even if you did allow multiplayer and this could be used for custom emotes, how are you going to replicate custom made animations? And if you allow to make your own combat animations, then the game is going to be about who makes better punch animations, etc? Basically you didn't explain much.
I've already seen a couple of your videos, but it's always about the engine. From that, I gather that you're not particularly interested in writing the setting, the story, the gamedesign, etc.