Hacker News Reader

Yes, in some interview he mentioned that Qud at the time was running as if it were a console app inside Unity. I don't know if that is still true after their UI overhaul, but if so it always seemed odd not to port it to MonoGame instead and save paying the fees.

View on HN

COQ applies a while bunch of stylistic appliques to the "console" look that may not be possible or at least easy in other game engines.

That's commonly implemented with shaders. Support for shaders is guaranteed in virtually any game engine.

If Unity has some fancy prebuilt shader library he's leveraging to generate the effects, reimplementing that from scratch might be a lot of work.

Scanlines and vignette are simple to implement and the main stylistic shaders they use. They also use a grayscale one if you trigger a specific situation. There might be others, but again, simple to write.

They also use the particles system for candelabras. Could be reproduced in many engines.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com