...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.
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.
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.
Predictable AF, unfortunately
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.
:(
FUUUUUUUUUUCK wasz so lꝏkin forward to that game ‼️‼️‼️‼️💀
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.
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