_m6gi

[flagged]

Impressive, keep going!

This is an impressive project and hopefully it will allow more programming beginners to get into multiplayer programming. Huge congrats. However, I am wondering: if your programming language is aimed at complete beginners, why make your language untyped and include undefined? Those are both fully loaded foot cannons. Sure, the language looks more inviting and probably gives the impression of faster development, but I'm not sure it's worth the amount of bugs that will be introduced eventually.

"(a) scripting, pacing, combat, economy: have an NPC brief the player on how to find the level exit, then place a ranged enemy turret, valuable item, and side-quest destination near the level exit"

Seems like this option should really be 2 different options. An NPC briefing the players about the exit is lazy and signals to the player that they are regarded as stupid. The rest is great.

I think reaching for the delusion card without considering people's preferences, experiences, expertise and philosophy is completely disingenuous and shows that you don't look at game development holistically. Yes, existing engines do a lot of lifting, especially in 3D rendering and physics. But what about games that don't have physics? Or have completely different physics than you would expect? You mentioned assets being the bottleneck, but what about games that don't use any assets at all? It's nice to have 3D solved, but what if your game attempts to emulate 4D? What if you just hate GUI and it slows you down?

For a more concrete argument. You also said learning Unreal using tutorials took a few days, which is certainly not possible, unless we are talking only about a very basic understanding. In the same vein, it also takes a few days to make a very basic engine built on top of OpenGL.

Many people often say that making an engine from scratch takes too long. But how long does it take to properly learn Unreal or Unity such that you can have an idea and turn it into a game without friction? Presumably, once your engine is finished, you are at that level of expertise instantly, which is a huge time saver. In my opinion, the more experienced of an engineer you are, the more the scales tip in the favor of rolling your own, from a time-spent perspective.

The more unique and niche your game is, the more true this is. Stumbling around Unreal's horrid UI for 3 months just to realize that the thing you want to do is barely even possible due to how general and off-the-shelf the engine is, is not a good experience. On the other hand, if you want to make a hyper-realistic, open-world RPG, then rolling your own is probably not a good idea.

I also believe that even if it's not always the most efficient thing to do, placing limitations on yourself by using a custom-made specialized engine makes the creativity really flow, and your game, even if not the most advanced, will be a lot more unique as a result of that.

C# is definitely popular for game development, but saying no other language comes close does not seem to be true. Looking at the most popular game engines and frameworks, it seems to be about as represented as anything else.

Game engines: Unreal - C++, Unity - C#, Godot - GDScript (Python) + second-class C# support

Frameworks: Raylib - C, Bevy - Rust, Love2D - Lua, Monogame - C#, Phaser - JS, PyGame - Python

We don't know for sure what AAA companies rolling their own engines use, but the industry standard would be written in C++, exposing C++ for programmers and Lua for non-programmers/modders.