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Let this be a lesson : do not re-develop your game engine when it's almost done already.
You can't delay your game until it's perfect as if you were Shigeru Miyamoto. You need to get something playable with a solid base out the dole, and iterate with feedback.
...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.
Yeah, there's a certain risk for rolling with your own engine, but if you start the project with the idea of having a custom engine you probably know what you're doing and have taken into account the complexities of having a custom engine. IMO if you're a group of small experienced devs having a custom engine is not really a show stopper, if you're a junior the project probably isn't even getting off the ground.
But changing the engine mid-project is almost always a huge decision and more often than not a killing blow for most projects. Depending on the stage of the project you're guaranteeing adding a year or two to your development. It's better to accept the limitations of the existing engine and compromise on the vision rather than swap engines in hopes of realizing the vision that got refined during development.
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.
Oh, I see what you mean, fair enough.
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
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.
Hideo Kojima had the FOX engine developed for Metal Gear Solid V, because he was tired of game devs thinking they knew better than him. He’d ask for something specific, and the game devs would do it differently because they thought they knew better. So he created his own engine, to be able to go “fucking fine, I’ll do it myself.” Essentially, he was tired of having his ideas filtered through the game devs, so he created his own engine to be able to understand how the engine worked and have a more direct hand in the development.
And MGSV is one of the most well polished games in history. The story is a hot mess because there was some politicking tomfoolery between Kojima and the publisher... But the actual gameplay is top notch, and the game runs smooth as butter on even low-end systems, while looking amazing.
The irony is that Konami almost immediately abandoned the FOX engine, due to the aforementioned politicking. Kojima left the company, and the engine was quickly relegated to only being used for bad soccer games that Konami cranked out every year. Then once the PS5 came around, Konami didn’t want to update the engine, so they abandoned it entirely.
Predictable AF, unfortunately
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.
That's really sad. Can we at least have their stuff now? I mean it would be a waste to not open-source all the code and assets they've developed and make them available under MIT, CC and similar licenses.
"No! If I can't make money off it then no one can have it!!"
-everyone, apparently.
:(
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 ‼️‼️‼️‼️💀