My Story. Or Why I'm not Using Unreal/Unity/Cryengine

NikitaSadkov

  • Posts: 6
After the release of the demo of my game The Spell of Mastery, my Russian friends started spreading rumors about me that I was crazy, schizophrenic, that my game allegedly contained viruses and stolen graphics.

> This is, by the way, not his art, but sprites ripped out of all sorts of games in the last 10 years. He really sat like an autist, and for several years he deciphered the file formats in all kinds of retro games. He even somewhere the source code of his was sprite ripping utility. With stolen assets it is impossible to sell, of course. It is strange that Gabe has not banned him from Steam yet.   -- Typical defamatory Russian comment

However, Russians failed to indicate where and what I've stolen. In fact, a part of the graphics was created by myself, another part was ordered to artists, or got from royalty free sites (such as itch.io and pixabay), and then edited for the needs of the game. Each file in my game contains the source of origin and the list of authors who participated in its creation.

I replied to such libel that I prohibit Russians to launch my game - that way they will have no problems with viruses. However, I indeed enjoyed reverse engineering and modifying commercial video games, digging in an assembly code, and wrote a collection of graphics converters combined into one package - SAU (Sprite and Archive Utility). However, in my game, The Spell of Mastery, I did not take a pixel from these games. I was just inspired by general ideas from such classic games as Lords of Chaos, Spellcraft and XCOM.

And then Russians, including my brother, began bullying me and kept repeating that my game sucks, because it is not like some other game, or because it is in 2d, while everyone today use cool 3d engines like Unreal, Cryengine or Unity, designed for large professional teams. Russians apparently had no idea, that developing a good 3d game costs a lots of money, in range of millions USD. Using industry standard AAA engine also requires a rather large team of programmers experienced in said engine, and even larger team of artists producing optimized low poly 3d models. Several examples, like Star Citizen, demonstrate that even industry veterans with huge teams, 20 million USD budgets and decades of experience are incapable to handle these heavy engines, like Unreal, and modify them for their game design needs.

It is far easier to just manually draw sprites into framebuffer, than to use complex 3d software, requiring PhD in computer graphics to understand. It is very easy to produce a simple 2d sprite, but can you image how hard and time consuming would be sculpting a similarly detailed 3d model in the very expensive ZBrush and animating it in even more expensive Maya? Even more, I use my own programming language Symta, and it would be near impossible to interface it with say Unity or Cryengine, which is written in C/C++ -- a language that doesn't support runtime introspection, and requires special very complicated parser to produce bindings. It is also much easier to optimize the drawing of 2,000,000 sprites at fixed angle camera than the drawing of 2,000,000 polygonal meshes, especially if camera is free, as required by 3d games standards. Russians gave me absolutely no discount for having organic brain damage (resulting into autism, psychopathy and schizophrenia), no education in art or computer science, no budget and in addition of me being persecuted by Russia, with all my bank account being blocked for terrorism. No. I still must use Unreal, even if I know nothing about it or professional 3d graphics.

ceosol

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  • Posts: 2279
So you programmed it in your own language called Symta? It looks nice, but the Journals topic is about Stencyl games in progress. Try posting this in chit-chat instead.

NikitaSadkov

  • Posts: 6
Well the post is about people who tell you to use Unreal, even if you have zero gamedev or programming experience, or scold you for having a 2d game. I have a lot of programming experience, enough to design my own programming language or read assembly code, yet I still wont dare to use Unreal or other heavy weight artillery, which requires a team for manning the pipeline. TLDR: if you use Unreal, you will likely accomplish nothing, if you use simpler tool like Stencyl you will have a finished game. And there are a lot of stories of experience gamedev veterans switching to Unreal and failing badly. The latest being that System Shock remake. So yeah, when people tell me to use Unreal or Unity, I get frustrated, because it is infinitely easier to just
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"screen[x][y] = pixel" than to glLoadMatrix

ceosol

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  • Posts: 2279
I totally agree with you. I have an unity contract and an unreal contract right now. They take a million times longer to get anything done.

This is still a chit-chat topic, though :D