Engine thoughts

[Duyroan]

Well, I don't know the technical details about the engine, but I will share my thoughts based on ideas of cost efficiency.

If something is NOT broken, don't fix it.

If the current engine used by you is sufficient to handle the game content you are going to ship with your future games (dynamic world, quests, progressive world development, etc.), just keep with it.

TBH, when we get into business aspect(s) of game development, it's all about budget management.

From OP, it seems the main motive of engine change is just for graphic enhancement.

The fancier the graphic, the higher the development cost, and hence less time available for game design, and gameplay usually suffers a lot in the end. This is what the "AAA" developers go for these days, as they only strive for "1st week/month sales" via promotion with "impressive graphics / videos".

But your fans base is not attracted by "fancy graphic" when you first publish your games, so it's better off just to spend your time further enhancing the game play experience instead.

For an indie developer, long-term support from a loyal fan base is much more crucial.

[Evander]

Considering the type of games you are doing,

the only real choice would be Unity.

That being said, you would have to redo everything but textures and sounds from the scratch.

Unity is good, because asset shop, tutorials, low cost, C# and the like.
And yes, if you load data from xml files for example, it can be made modder-friendly (there is even a way to extend code via dll, look at RimWorld)

But apart from that, maybe consider working on Unity and seeing how it goes as a side project to your games. An effort may not be worth all the work you will put in.

Having an already established code base (btw, give us some snippets of your old code, so we could all have a laugh - 2004 was when Clean Code wasn't popular yet, right?) - there is no reason to change.

I mean, SpiderWeb does it's crappy games reusing everything over and over, and they are still on the market, so why bother?

Improve upon an existing engine, but more importantly - improve game design.

I own enough of your games to know that design and gameplay is something you don't do well.

There is this book "A theory of fun for game design" - an indepth read is in order.

I won't elaborate on this, unless you want me to - just know, that graphics will always be secondary to gameplay fun that peps will have when playing your games. But lack of fun is a cardinal sin.

I know you are user friendly Steven, I can see you try, but every time I look at your games, I see features that were not quite balanced, missing something, or not quite well implemented.

I know you can do better

[Destro*]

It would definitely be interesting to see the next game by Shadow made in Unity. Better graphics and smoother gameplay would be the obvious huge benefits that I'd love to see.

However, I don't think one should limit themselves to just Unity. There are very many great tools out there that can be used to make great games. And, it's evident that you can be successful with those tools by checking out how many indie games are successful on Steam.

[Castruccio]

Originally Posted by Evander

I own enough of your games to know that design and gameplay is something you don't do well.

On the contrary, I think the gameplay of Soldak games is excellent. They are fun despite their rough edges. It's the gameplay that brings me back.

[Evander]

Originally Posted by Castruccio

On the contrary, I think the gameplay of Soldak games is excellent. They are fun despite their rough edges. It's the gameplay that brings me back.

You are a niche then. If they were excellent, Soldak would sell many more copies - they are 'good enough' for us, regular Soldak fanbase, but the wider audience does not share our sentiment.

[treborx555]

I think an engine change is a must.

You can still make it as moddable as you want, the important thing though is having the bare minimum of nice looking graphics (even if they're cartoony) and fluid animations and sounds.

The main reason i can't enjoy soldak games for longer than an hour is the lack of fluidity. Most spells feel bad to use and overall gameplay is annoying.

Gameplay for me was basically

* attack
* step on trap, ouch sounds
* invisible aliens start appearing around me
* keep chugging potions and attacking
* stones start falling from the cave roof
* i step on another trap
* trap spills liquid everywhere, multiplying
* my aoe spell makes the game lag to hell because it hits all the tiny liquid droplets
* more stones start falling
* i die

The core gameplay loop really must be better than this. Even if graphics are good, i still wouldn't play more than a few hours.

[Evander]

Originally Posted by treborx555

I think an engine change is a must.

You can still make it as moddable as you want, the important thing though is having the bare minimum of nice looking graphics (even if they're cartoony) and fluid animations and sounds.

The main reason i can't enjoy soldak games for longer than an hour is the lack of fluidity. Most spells feel bad to use and overall gameplay is annoying.

Gameplay for me was basically

* attack
* step on trap, ouch sounds
* invisible aliens start appearing around me
* keep chugging potions and attacking
* stones start falling from the cave roof
* i step on another trap
* trap spills liquid everywhere, multiplying
* my aoe spell makes the game lag to hell because it hits all the tiny liquid droplets
* more stones start falling
* i die

The core gameplay loop really must be better than this. Even if graphics are good, i still wouldn't play more than a few hours.

Well, sound effects is something I mod for Soldak fantasy series.
I used music from Diablo (figures) and combined sound effects from M&M and Kohan 2 to make the game sound and feel better. I think I should have my old files somewhere.

It was nice when skills were sounding as they should and using heavy hitting skills made you feel like it really was a heavy hit that was delivered.

As for the game lagging, you do yourself a favour and limit particles. They are the bane of Soldak games, and I've actually went to extreme length to manually edit particle settings for objects, to keep some particle effects but remove others exactly to avoid lagging.

Apart from that, yea, core gameplay could use some improvements. You think we can convince Shadow to copy paste some diablo1/2 mechanics to new engine?