i am encouraging everyone to post a spicy take about a game engine (or tool like Aseprite, etc) and just fully incriminate yourself with it.
my take
i think my take is Hot particularly because i don’t even use this engine, so i don’t have a horse in the race at all here. but I came up with this just reviewing and looking over GMS tutorials. i think GMS2 should migrate completely into a “GMS3” project, with NO engine feature changes, instead just pulling a complete reset on documentation and tutorials to focus on the current standards for language features. the idea here is that since I first saw the engine, the GML language did not even have structs or functions built into the language - but it seems to me every update coming out improves the scripting language’s QoL by a lot, to the point where all the original content out there guiding folks on things just looks like really poor coding practices compared to newer possible patterns. it seems like the only way to get around this is to completely delineate and say “okay now this is GMS3” - and any and all guides coming out are just far more likely to have better coding standards by default, even if there aren’t any actual updates to anything. I think godot could similarly do this with the Typed/Untyped variantes of GDscript, but it’s not as necessary because that issue is solvable with a linter, more or less.
also now that the unity free tier allows you to hide their splash scren i will drop a reminder that i have and always will maintain the opinion that Unity should Bring Back the Graphics/Input config window so you can do jokes like Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor:
not so sure if those are hot takes since i haven’t been following the “engine scenes” for years now, but here i go:
the gamemaker studio 2.3 “hype update” killed part of the reason i loved gms so much. mainly, the new asset manager sucked imo, the old system was good enough and the new one introduced way too much unnecessary complexity for my taste, and there is (was?) no good way to revert to the old way other than downgrading back to 2.2. i don’t use gms anymore but at the time i was an active user and it made me stop loving the software
pico-8 not being open source is lame as fuck for a platform that relies on sharing source available games
i dislike the way venerable engines as time goes got rid of their identifiable quirks, i love the look of gms1 games, the unity launcher was funny and construct 2 games had a very distinct charm (do i need to say anything about flash?). nowadays i have hard time saying if a game is built in engine or uses a custom engine. i know it’s probably a positive to most, but i’d disagree because many amateur games feel less cool now than before partly because of that
yeah wait what this is actually making me mad ?? like i had just been assuming it was this whole time. It looks like there have been some attempts at runtime emulators and such - but nobody’s tried to do any external/thirdparty editor for it yet
there’s some relatively good emulators, but none of them (afaik) have 100% parity with pico-8. i hope zep will end up releasing the source in the future (for preservation sake at least!), but i’m not optimistic on that
that’s part of the reasons why i try to use tic-80 whenever i feel the urge to make a smol game (spoiler: they never turn out to be small), but while i love tic-80 it has a completely different feel from pico-8, and is certainly less beginner friendly. a good or bad thing depending on what you are looking for
you don’t need an engine. seriously there’s a good chance a lightweight graphics framework or even just systems level shenanigans are something you can handle. people think they need engines when you don’t. also unless you’re making like an FPS your game probably doesn’t need to be 3D
the engine you use will inevitably change how your game feels. unity shooters do not feel like unreal shooters do not feel like source shooters. this isn’t to say that you can’t make a good shooter in a given engine (i’ve played brilliant shooters in basically every engine) but it’s somehow Controversial to point out that the fundamental technologies you use will effect how your game plays
programming less and having more time for production and design is the smartest and most efficient way to make a video game, actually. any tool, asset, engine etc. that allows you to sufficiently do what you want to do while also not taking 5+ years off your life in the pre-production and production processes is a big freaking plus, and most people who claim you need to be doing everything on a game yourself or you’re not “actually indie” or something are elitists and fools.
i’ve seen this mentality infect and poison the creativity of many a game developer since TIGsource and after, and seeing it so commonplace solidified my stance: make a damn game, even if it’s in scratch, or rpg maker 2003, or game maker, or ““worse””. the moment someone tells you it’s not “real”, they’re speaking from a position that attempts to pull up the ladder rather than lowering it.
