What game engine?

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raik
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What game engine?

Post by raik »

Hello everyone!

Long time member and never posted yet... so here's my first one!

I've worked for almost 10 years in video game industry as a graphic lead and begun coding a few years ago. I began to create my game but I'm facing some issues regarding the game engine.
I've tried to make it using Unity but the results were not what I was expecting, and finally turned to Godot Engine. But it's kinda weird how to handle scenes (or maybe it's just me huh).

So I was wondering what game engines do you use for your games, and what are their pros and cons?
I'm looking for a pixel perfect engine (320*240) as the game is intended to be ran on a CRT screen.
Title screen running on my Blast city

Also, this is a topic that has not really been discussed here, I've seen that a lot of you have coded their game engine but for not so hard-coding fellas it would be a pain (I'm a java developer... sorry bout that :p).

Thanks for your help!
Fat Pug Studio
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Re: What game engine?

Post by Fat Pug Studio »

Unity3d, big mistake for this type of game :lol:
raik
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Re: What game engine?

Post by raik »

Fat Pug Studio wrote:Unity3d, big mistake for this type of game :lol:
Agreed! Tried to make it pixel perfect but was way too complicated for a simple sprite so I dropped this solution.
Fat Pug Studio
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Re: What game engine?

Post by Fat Pug Studio »

It's not a big problem to make it pixel-perfect, but it's overengineered for everything else.
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Sumez
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Re: What game engine?

Post by Sumez »

I always make my own engines, no matter what language I'm working with. It's probably not the most effective choice, but engine making is one of my interests, and I like being in total control. If you're going to go the bullet hell route there's probably some optimizations you'd be better off making yourself from scratch anyway.

I'd still use external frameworks for stuff like graphics rendering, input handling and sound playback etc. though. No reason to trouble myself more than necessary.
For the sake of some really high level languages such as C#, some basic frameworks like MonoGame are helpful but not really necessary. Shoot'em ups usually isn't too demanding of a genre unless you want to make crazy 3D effects and stuff. Unity is definitely crazy overkill.
raik
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Re: What game engine?

Post by raik »

Sumez wrote:I always make my own engines, no matter what language I'm working with. It's probably not the most effective choice, but engine making is one of my interests, and I like being in total control. If you're going to go the bullet hell route there's probably some optimizations you'd be better off making yourself from scratch anyway.

I'd still use external frameworks for stuff like graphics rendering, input handling and sound playback etc. though. No reason to trouble myself more than necessary.
For the sake of some really high level languages such as C#, some basic frameworks like MonoGame are helpful but not really necessary. Shoot'em ups usually isn't too demanding of a genre unless you want to make crazy 3D effects and stuff. Unity is definitely crazy overkill.
Heard well!
So what you're saying is that I could make my own engine using any language (would be java or C# for me) instead of using one?
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Sumez
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Re: What game engine?

Post by Sumez »

Depends on wether that rocks your boat, but I mean why not? A 2D shooters is (in theory) such a simple concept that you could make one that does only what you need it to, and avoid bloating it with all kinds of other stuff.
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Shepardus
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Re: What game engine?

Post by Shepardus »

STG Builder may be a good choice if you can read Japanese, and if you can't, there are ongoing efforts to translate it.
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Sai'ke
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Re: What game engine?

Post by Sai'ke »

I think it depends on what your objective is.

If you want to practice coding in lower level languages and learn a bit more about how pipelines work, how to deal with hierarchical transforms, physics, object construction by composition, binding in a scripting language for enemy behaviors, creating an engine can be a super nice learning experience. Mind though that unless you use frameworks or engines for handling stuff, all problems that crop up will be yours to handle.

I started with my own engine and it cost me two years (working only on it in the evening hours) to get it up to speed with what I want before I could even start thinking about working on any actual game. I don't regret it, because I learned a ton and I do really like that it works exactly in the way I want now, but if I'd have to do it again, I'd probably go for one of the existing engines.

Porting can be a pain if you don't take it into account off the bat (many engines already successfully deploy to multiple platforms). Getting it to run on a wide array of computers can be a pain (different computers may support different extensions, OGL versions). A lot of these things are already handled in engines.

I think Unity can do pixel perfect 2D just fine nowadays. I've seen several pixel perfect unity games. If you don't need crazy performance or low level access and like to stay high level, Love (https://love2d.org/) might be worth considering. I've seen several platformers based on Love. Even ones with a lot of pretty particle effects. It's based on Lua and is pretty nice for rapidly prototyping things. Game maker has also matured quite a lot. And it's capable enough nowadays to make a decent shmup.
raik
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Re: What game engine?

Post by raik »

Thank you all for your advices.

I've worked with Löve but found it too limited regarding screen handling (as I want to make a game for arcade cabinets).

So I begun coding the game with Godot Engine for the moment. It's quite handy actually and works pretty fine.

I think I'll try to get my hands dirty for my second project. I'm just wondering if i should keep it with the languages i know (java / c#) or get into a lower level language. So I guess C++ is the right way to go ?

After testing Löve, Unity and Godot i'd say the perfect pixel perfect engine is Godot.
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Shepardus
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Re: What game engine?

Post by Shepardus »

I believe Blue Revolver was made using Love, so if danbo sees this maybe he can chime in on his experience with it.

I'd be interested in hearing how your experience with Godot goes. I've been following its development for a while but haven't used it for anything yet. Haven't seen many shooters made with it either.
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raik
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Re: What game engine?

Post by raik »

Shepardus wrote:I believe Blue Revolver was made using Love, so if danbo sees this maybe he can chime in on his experience with it.

I'd be interested in hearing how your experience with Godot goes. I've been following its development for a while but haven't used it for anything yet. Haven't seen many shooters made with it either.
For the moment, i'm quite happy with it actually. Began a week ago and actually it's really handy once you got how the scripting works (I made the switch from a poc made in Löve ^^).
The scene switch system is kinda weird but it provides a singleton-like implementation for data storage, a shader system which seems to be complete (not tested as i'm going 90's all made in pixels by hand).

Got a testing build just to see how things work if you wanna give it a try.

Haven't tested sound functionnalities yet though. Anyway it's really user friendly, you can code in C#, C++, there's a node system for non-coding people too and in GDScript (it's really just a mix between LUA and python).
DrBlowhole20
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Re: What game engine?

Post by DrBlowhole20 »

raik wrote:Hello everyone!

Long time member and never posted yet... so here's my first one!

I've worked for almost 10 years in video game industry as a graphic lead and begun coding a few years ago. I began to create my game but I'm facing some issues regarding the game engine.
I've tried to make it using Unity but the results were not what I was expecting, and finally turned to Godot Engine. But it's kinda weird how to handle scenes (or maybe it's just me huh).

So I was wondering what game engines do you use for your games, and what are their pros and cons?
I'm looking for a pixel perfect engine (320*240) as the game is intended to be ran on a CRT screen.
Title screen running on my Blast city

Also, this is a topic that has not really been discussed here, I've seen that a lot of you have coded their game engine but for not so hard-coding fellas it would be a pain (I'm a java developer... sorry bout that :p).

Thanks for your help!

Howdy there. If your interested, i've released a partially complete english patch, but be aware that it's not complete and there is still some work to do.
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=62645

EDIT: SB has planned to (finally) include English language in the next upcoming major version, but it will be taking months to finish, so we're still working on the english patch.
Last edited by DrBlowhole20 on Mon Jun 11, 2018 10:05 am, edited 1 time in total.
raik
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Re: What game engine?

Post by raik »

I'll check this out when i got time ^^

So far it's been two weeks I'm working on Godot. Since my first impressions which were mitigates I can say I'm quite happy with this engine and really enjoying it actually.
There's really numerous ways to handle events, pass data from an object to an other and you really can code as you like. You have numerous ways to do one thing depending on what you're used to.
The engine is handling bullets quite well, I'm implementing the first bullet patterns and it's easier than i thought. Still have to read the Q&A on Bullet Scripting and obviously need to get up to date on algebra haha ^^

Anyway here's the game running on my cabinet and a quick pattern test

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiwsoGi56ms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_x01jf9kBE
raik
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Re: What game engine?

Post by raik »

Shepardus wrote:I believe Blue Revolver was made using Love, so if danbo sees this maybe he can chime in on his experience with it.

I'd be interested in hearing how your experience with Godot goes. I've been following its development for a while but haven't used it for anything yet. Haven't seen many shooters made with it either.
Heyall!

A quick update about how my experience with Godot goes. So far I'm really enjoying this engine, it handles a good amount of sprites and calculation on screen without any performance issues.

Tile handling isn't bad at all, i'm using atlases and huge maps for my game (the level background is a single png 3600*240px, with smaller atlases for clouds and such) and haven't seen any stuttering during my game sessions (running on an old core2duo with 2gb of ddr2).
Their signal system (which is simply event emitting) is quiet handy, you write your code for a bullet and emit signals on collision or whatever and grab it on the go when they're triggered on the parent. In terms of coding speed it's really great once you got how it works.
Coding a full behavior for a bullet would take around 1 to 10 minutes from scratch including complex patterns.

So yeah, to me it's the perfect engine for pixel art games which gets rid of all the engine creation issues ^^
At least for someone like me which hasn't ever worked with low-level programming.
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juju
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Re: What game engine?

Post by juju »

I haven't got around messing with Godot yet, but it seems to be rising in popularity at a steady rate.

Currently I'm working with Game Maker: Studio, and loving it. I had a bit of a stigma with it because the old GM was really, really bad, but GMS is quite solid (though my game is minuscule, so I'm not sure about how it'd handle huge images like that).

Coding is very fast too, and it's got that drag n' drop bullshit if you're not in the mood to write a few lines. It's quite handy sometimes.
Hikikomori
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Re: What game engine?

Post by Hikikomori »

raik wrote:Thank you all for your advices.

I've worked with Löve but found it too limited regarding screen handling (as I want to make a game for arcade cabinets).

So I begun coding the game with Godot Engine for the moment. It's quite handy actually and works pretty fine.

I think I'll try to get my hands dirty for my second project. I'm just wondering if i should keep it with the languages i know (java / c#) or get into a lower level language. So I guess C++ is the right way to go ?

After testing Löve, Unity and Godot i'd say the perfect pixel perfect engine is Godot.
How you get your game run on a Blast city?

Raspberry pi?
raik
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Re: What game engine?

Post by raik »

Hikikomori wrote: How you get your game run on a Blast city?

Raspberry pi?
Nope, for the moment I'm running a 15khz pc, looking forward for a custom pcb with x86 architecture.
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