GlaireDaggersJan 8, 2023

Well I've reviewed what exactly I want out of Foxblade, and have been doing a survey of all the major engines. I gave Godot a spin, fiddled with Unreal, opened Unity and felt an immediate wave of dread before promptly closing it again, and even gave Electron+PixiJS+WebGL a shot.

At which point I exclaimed to myself "Fuck this, I will just write it in FNA and it will be fine."

Show threadGlaireDaggersJan 8, 2023
To be honest, I've been thinking about this a lot. I want to go back to the 2D action RPG mechanics of the very first Unity prototype I made, and given that, what exactly do I get out of an engine like Godot or Unity?
Back when I used Unity I still ended up writing a *lot* of custom support stuff (physics, animation, etc).
Really, the only benefits that are hard to argue are UI library & particle systems, but I think I can manage those two anyway. For UI I can just roll my own very simple system (this is meant to look like a PS1/Saturn game, so the UI will not be terribly complex anyway), and for particle systems honestly I can probably just cheat and bake texture sheets out of Effekseer or something 🤷‍♀️
Show threadSyscrusher

@glairedaggers For the game code itself, you might not get that much if your coding style is to prefer rolling many of your own subsystems. What about target platforms and asset import pipelines? (I'm not asserting those are things you would need from a published engine, only that they are possible areas to consider.)

The only other thing that comes to mind is whether you prefer to work solo or would want to collaborate with another dev, in which case their preferences and experience might influence this decision.

Jan 9, 2023 at 2:29amWeb
Show threadGlaireDaggersJan 9, 2023
@syscrusher Sure, I've considered those points. Asset import pipelines don't need to be very complex here because I don't really need any asset post processing here (I'm just using plain PNGs, OGGs, JSON config files, etc so they can be directly loaded at runtime).
Target platforms for now are probably just Windows & Linux. Switch would be nice, but probably not worth worrying about until/unless I have a publisher (so leaving that as a problem for future me)