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Comment by diceduckmonk | Hacker News Reader

One of the good ol’ college mistake we made during our game dev capstone was spending half of it reinventing the wheel for a tile editor.

I recently used Tiled with RpgMaker and it feels like 2d sprite / tile editors are a solved problem. I also notice how 3d game engines note that they can also support 2D games. That space seems quite saturated and investing into 2D features seems like scratching one own’s itch. It feels like there is more upside to going all in on the 3d aspect, but potentially the 2D elements are quick to implement features to add to an engine’s laundry list of features.

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I think this is a common feature (set) of modern game engines.

Unity and Godot do support 2d games development, so Fyrox, attempting to be a competitor in that space, supports it as well.

It's definitely going to take a lot of work, but the feature itself seems a modern standard, to me.

That is a great idea when the goal is to learn when to implement engines, not when doing a game.

When I gradutated, writing a particle engine was a subject complex enough for graduation project, nowadays it is a bullet point on an engine feature list.

I also think that in general game engines should quit trying to do everything and focus on specific niches. This makes the game engine simpler to build, which means everything can be better, and makes the games easier to build as well, by a large margin.

Rather than Unity and Unreal, I feel like we should have:

1. Game engines for 3D level based pre baked games 2. Game engines for procedurally generated 3d games 3. Game engines for isometric 3d rpg games 4. Game engines for 2d top down rpg games 5. Game engines for 3d space games

and so on

Some of these exist! Especially number 4, some people have build #3 but they did it on top of Unity, so you are still waiting 10 minutes for massive Unity stuff to load all the time.

There is one game engine for "isometric" RPG but that engine is not used anymore for various reasons.

It is the "Aurora Toolkit" from Neverwinter Nights.

As far as I know the only game that used it that is not from Bioware or Bioware-related companies is Witcher 1, that wasn't isometric anyway. (also I am not sure why they used that engine... since the game doesn't use Aurora Toolkit strenghts in any form...)

I am unable to remember the details but fun fact, the witcher 1 engine started life as mdk2. I don't think ether of the neverwinter nights games was isometric, I suspect you are thinking of what balders gate used, sometime known as the infinity engine

Infinity Engine was 2D.

Neverwinter Nights was a full 3D engine but the gameplay and controls were clearly descended from Infinity Engine ,at least the first game... (I didn't play the second to be sure).

So it could do a 3D "Isometric", if you wanted to. As far as I know it is the only dedicated 3D RPG engine that wasn't intended to be controlled as third person "shooter" style controls.

I think the idea of being able to develop both kinds of games with one (mostly) shared skillset has a ton of appeal. Not to mention the assumption that games are either 2D or 3D is not always correct.

Most 2D games are often rendered in a 3D world anyway. So that you can get cool transitions or concepts like distance much more easily.

Unity3D is still the defacto for most gaming studios and I agree with the first point that the game engine space is very saturated. Still I admire all the work and great 2D engines can render faster on specific hardware (cocos2D was a good example)! I say focus on one niche and build better integrated tools for that niche.

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