I have searched all around and it feels like using an actual full blown game engine is what I need for my project.
I’m curious does any one have examples of full text based games made in these engines. I found a few on itch and I know suzerain was made in unity . I just feel like a full game engine has a lot of the features out of the box that I want and I don’t have to force it to be something it’s not. I know twine is good but I don’t think it be handle what I want because while the initial game is text base. I would like to go back and add animation ,voice acting , cut scenes etc later on in the future and I know with something like twine that either he impossible or just an outright pain.
I also want dynamic NPCs who act like the emergent a.i NPCs you see in regular graphical games whose world state changes depending on your actions/choices . The game will also have lots of excessive branching . I want the ability to add on to it as gain more skills . I feel using an actual engine I won’t have to switch half way through development .
Depending on what kind of game you want to make, Ink has a Unity plugin (it also has an Unreal plugin). It could probably handle the “Twine” parts of what you envision.
It is godot just doesn’t seem to have a lot of game examples period . Especially not on steam . Godot is the engine im leaning towards but I worried because unlike unity where you have plugins for like everything I know Godot doesn’t have as many features . Also it’s very easy to make unity games work for mobile and put them in the android store . I can’t really find any examples of Godot games in android .
I really like ppl to be able to play both on mobile and PC and eventually a port to a console .
Yeah, I’m doing a lot of this in engine (UE5), though in my case I am dividing my game into 3d world segments (with that stuff) and more traditional text adventure segments (though i am seeing how far i might want to take images for the text bit, in terms of capturing renders from the 3d world). But the engine is for sure capable.
As it happens, I am giving a talk later today at an Unreal Meetup on how to automate dialogue animations for metahuman NPCs. It’s crazy good tech.
At some point I may make my stuff more user friendly, but it’s just so involved that I don’t think it will ever be suitable for general/public use. I’ve built my system from scratch in the engine, but maybe you can interface existing IF systems into UE5 and work on the cinematics separately.
Godot I would say is a great choice for side scrollers or top down 2d stuff. Maybe a good choice if you are going for a stylized 2d look. Otherwise i would consider Unity or UE5. The latter has a steep learning curve in some ways, but it is very much an industry standard and has a lot of support for animation / metahumans and other systems relevant to what you are looking to do. Console ports is one thing, but adapting a game for mobile is … pretty hard? Ruthless market too. If you are not 100% on top of your knowledge of the engine, I’d suggest you look at PC only at first.
Is mobile that hard like half the stuff in my app store is unity games indie unity ones at that. I do notice a lot of text based developers don’t seem to develop with mobile games in mind. Also from my understanding it’s significantly easier to get your game listed in Android app store than Apple. Apple has strict requirements and I notice the apps they do have are alot more polished and put together then the ones in Google play store .
I was looking at unreal engine too but everyone says it’s a bit much because for me the animation will be light animation using live 2d. Im not a big fan of 3d animation unless it’s stylized alot of times it gives me a serious case of the uncanny valley when they to hard to make the faces look realistic . If anything I find a way where I could blend 2d art with 3d .
The animation would only likely be for the battles/wars on like 3d isometric map. You would be able to position your soldiers and attack . That is far down the line to just get the game done I’m starting off fully text based .
Edit: After further I feel pixel art is the path for me .
Godot is a very promising up and comer, but it’s not yet as mature or well adopted as Unity and Unreal Engine, which is why you’ve found fewer examples.
Unity and UE are in many ways equivalent, but Unity’s management team has been making a lot of bad decisions in the recent years – bad, as in, unfriendly to their developers. UE’s got a steeper learning curve but is superior in some ways, and is probably a safer long-term bet than Unity in terms of its corporate management.
Either Unity or UE will publish equally well to both iOS and Android. Though the Google Play Store was historically more laissez faire than the Apple store, that balance has been shifting over the last few years, with Google placing increasing requirements on developers. I maintain a game originally made with Unity 2017, and it’s gotten harder and harder each year to keep it up to date with Play Store requirements, which is half Google’s fault and half Unity’s fault. Another game I maintain was made around the same time, is on the App Store, and has never required an update. Apple has requirements on paper, but once an app is published, they rarely come calling with new requirements.
@fatmarrow called mobile a ruthless market. The truth of it is simply that the gold rush of developers getting rich with mobile apps is long over, and now success is basically just a random lottery. I’ve had several games on the app stores that have cumulatively had a few hundred players. Big companies may be able to brute force their way to success, but as an individual, you have the same chances of publishing a hugely successful mobile app as you do of becoming a rock god or a movie star. (Which no doubt contributes to the attitudes of many of the people here who are not motivated by profit.)
I am not sure that Godot has much support for cross platform builds, but I know next to nothing about it. But if you are going for a 2D / pixel art look, then I would def steer clear of Unreal Engine. If you are new to an engine, again, I would suggest that finishing a game on a single platform (e.g. PC) may be a sufficiently challenging proposition. Perhaps target that first and then look at cross platform stuff afterwards. But your game, your call.
Re mobile stuff, to do big numbers you either need to be crazy lucky, or spend huge amounts on advertising. The games that you do see lots of adverts for are very precisely designed. They have psychologists figure out what colour to have UI elements, for example, and the precise ratios of events and player rewards to keep people hooked. The expectations are for apps to be free now, and carefully tuned microtransactions are a must if you want to turn a profit after all that. And mobile has tight technical requirements, so you have to dumb down your visual bells and whistles, and seamlessly support an extremely wide range of screen sizes and aspect ratios. Overall, it’s a huge amount of time/money to take a punt that you are overwhelmingly likely to lose. So yeah, a ruthless market. This has been my pep talk for today.
It has, although as far as I know cross-platform support in Godot is more limited than in Unity. Supporting both mobile and desktop is never going to be painless, though.
I’ve had great success with Godot exporting small games to windows, linux, mac, and web (with the major caveat that you still can’t export a C# project to web in Godot 4). It also supports Android, and I think iOS with some extra steps, although I haven’t tried that. The main limitation with Godot is consoles, because including export templates in an open-source project would violate the terms of the proprietary SDKs for those consoles.
One engine I’ve been looking at is Narrat. It was designed somewhat based on Disco Elysium which if you remove the graphics is a conversational choice-narrative/QBN with lots of stats and support for multiple characters speaking with portraits. It allows full screen graphics and clickable maps and sound.
While Narrat likely is not as widely used as Godot, there are example games:
what are the requirements because one thing I say apple does better than android is the apps aren’t like a hot buggy mess. Sometimes left wondering how they got approved so many apps freeze up my phone,crash my phone ,lock the screen or act as borderline malware . One of the major differences I see on Google vs apple apps is on Google apps half the reviews are telling you the app doesn’t even work or it worked for only two/three months then it starts crashing .
Curious what do you think is better my game is a visual novel.
1)Full pixel art with dialogue boxes examples To the moon characters can move around , explore etc. I can even do cut scenes in this style .
2)Or Static backgrounds with light character animation in live 2d. ( With this I could initially have all static backgrounds) So development would be a lot faster .
3)Actually a third option is static backgrounds with pixel art on a isometric map for the war/battle elements of the game. The static backgrounds will have light animation like maybe eyes , mouths or hands. I see a lot of visual novels do something like this
I like the pixel art better because live 2d seems tedious. Also pixel art seems to have a lot more example of the type of game I want to make . Basically a more interactive visual novel. I don’t just want endless clicking of choices .
Japanese RPGs have a lot of the story based elements . Like the turn based combat and some of the strategical elements . This would be for the warfare portion of the game .