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Ask HN: Favorite Game Engine?

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Re: Ask HN: Favorite Game Engine?

#23
Favourite in what way?

Unreal seems to produce the most impressive visuals.

Bevy seems to make it easy to produce WebGL. As a hobbyist and a Rustacean, this is my choice. But I have no aim to release anything commercial with a timeline. I’d go Unreal then.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite Game Engine?

#24
I am not primarily a game developer. But I wanted to see how some of it works.

The engine that has been instrumental to it is DragonRuby Game Toolkit [0]. It was easy to set up and use. And I developed a simple game [1] following a really accessible book [2].

It uses Ruby which is an easy language to pick up- especially as someone who is experienced in Python.

I really loved the experience and talked with the author to turn the book into a livecoding tutorial series.

[0]: https://dragonruby.org/toolkit/game

[1]: https://github.com/ritog/dragon-game

[1a]: https://ritog.itch.io/silly-dragon-target-game

[2]: https://dragonridersunite.itch.io/dragonruby-book

Re: Ask HN: Favorite Game Engine?

#25
I tried a bunch of the popular game engines and none of them really clicked for me. It wasn't until I found A-Frame and Three.js (which isn't an engine at all, but a Web 3D XR VR AR Renderer) that had an Entity-Component Architecture with a foss eco system of components that you could mix and match then things started making more sense.

So did I cleverly use all these freely built components to make the greatest XR experience ever? Nah, I decided to re-invent the wheel and do everything myself :). I do enjoy the challenge and freedom to build my own ultimate tool though and I know it's not likely others will use it, but I did release it under GPL3 anyways. It has a wiki (slightly outdated atm :)), starter script and some examples too.

It's pretty fun as both a learning/practice experience and actually be able to use it for various builds. Makes it even easier to prototype XR ideas which I love. I am currently wrapping v0.3 which has added tons of improvements, although it's not exactly ready for release, if anyone feels like checking it out I added some links as ref...

* AUXL (A-Frame UX Library) v0.3 repo --> https://github.com/Minty-Crisp/AUXL

* AUXL Grid Collision/No Clip v0.3 Demo -> https://auxlibrary.com/

* AUXL Physics & Powers v0.3 Demo -> https://minty-crisp.github.io/AUXL/physics.html

* Minty's XRcade (mini game arcade built with AUXL) -> https://mintyxr.com

Re: Ask HN: Favorite Game Engine?

#26
post #16

Game Maker 8 wasn't perfect but boy do I miss it. nowadays I just do my own stuff but it's kind of interesting that nobody's really made an open-source Game Maker clone, to my knowledge.

Game Maker is still available: https://gamemaker.io/en

GameMaker is not Game Maker, at least, to me. either way: not open-source.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite Game Engine?

#28
Current game I've been developing with Monogame, but its 3D support continues to not be that great, especially multiplatform (and I've had trouble figuring out how to get even basic shaders working with it). I've managed to get it working okay to develop the game as far as I have with it, but I keep stumbling with it, and the models in the game don't look as nice as they do even just importing the same files into Unity.

I've also been a bit frustrated by the lack of updates or communication from the team in general (and their develop Github branch hasn't had any activity since May except for a dozen pull request merges 2 days ago) that I'm considering looking into how hard it would be to port my game to Godot (was considering Unity before the announcement today).

I'm suspecting hard enough I might want to just stick with Monogame until this game is out there, though, and maybe make my next game using Godot.

I also like Phaser.js for web games.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite Game Engine?

#30
PhaserJS for when I want complete control, and Construct 2 for rapid prototyping even if it's a bit quirky (instance archetypes, selected object lists, etc). Unfortunately they no longer sell it and have since moved to a subscription service with an annual fee.

If I can devote some time, I'd love to check out Defold. I've heard good things about it.

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