I guess the writing was on the wall considering the game has been in development hell for many years, but I still look back at the original announcement trailer and think about how cool this game could have been. It was essentially sold as Minecraft but better - with proper combat, better exploration, powerful dedicated modding tools, and more. It was to be created by the creators of probably the biggest Minecraft server ever, which meant they understood the ins and outs of the game and what it needed to improve.
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.
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.
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.
After all this he still hit another home run with Death Stranding. It sure didn’t seem like Guerrilla’s Decima engine was holding him back, even with the unconventional mechanics and weird visuals. But I don’t know, I wasn’t there for the development process.
He actually had a hand in tweaking Decima too! When he signed on with Guerrilla, they basically hadn’t planned on offering the engine for external use. It was something they had simply developed for themselves. Guerrilla gave Kojima the framework, and went “well you helped develop FOX, so help us develop Decima (the new name for the previously unnamed engine) too.”
The engine name is even a reference to Dejima Island, which was a Dutch trading port in Japan; For much of Japan’s history, the Dutch were the only ones allowed to trade with Japan. So the name has some strong symbolic meanings, with Guerrilla being a Dutch company and Kojima being Japanese.
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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.
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.
After all this he still hit another home run with Death Stranding. It sure didn’t seem like Guerrilla’s Decima engine was holding him back, even with the unconventional mechanics and weird visuals. But I don’t know, I wasn’t there for the development process.
He actually had a hand in tweaking Decima too! When he signed on with Guerrilla, they basically hadn’t planned on offering the engine for external use. It was something they had simply developed for themselves. Guerrilla gave Kojima the framework, and went “well you helped develop FOX, so help us develop Decima (the new name for the previously unnamed engine) too.”
The engine name is even a reference to Dejima Island, which was a Dutch trading port in Japan; For much of Japan’s history, the Dutch were the only ones allowed to trade with Japan. So the name has some strong symbolic meanings, with Guerrilla being a Dutch company and Kojima being Japanese.