Critical Engine Discussion Thread

[Deathworks]

Hi!

Seeing that people do have some strong feelings about this very basic and general topic relevant for many creators of vore games, I am starting this thread in hope that a) the disruption of threads ends, b) people's opinions are voiced in such a way that they can actually help improve something (if such improvement is necessary).

So, if you have some general thoughts on game design using specific engines, this is the place to explain your position. Likewise, if you are considering writing a game, I recommend you look through the comments as they may give you hints about pit falls you want to avoid. So, this thread is aimed at players and game creators alike.

The rules of this site still apply for this thread! Especially the following:

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2) This page only allow adult over 18 of age to visit!
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4) Be respectful of others at all times.
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5) Ranting is prohibited
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6) Personal attacks are prohibited.
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7) Trolling is prohibited.
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16) Post constructively.
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In order to have this thread run smoothly, there are a few things I would like contributors to take into consideration (in other words, rules for this thread):

1. All criticism must contain something that people can do something about. So, posting just "Me hatez RPGMaker!" is NOT ENOUGH. Likewise, posting "Me hatez RPGMaker because Enterbrain is evil." is also not useful as people can't do anything about that. Instead, explain why you are dissatisfied with the way people create games, for instance: "I have the impression that too many users of RPGMaker neglect spell checking and using complete and correct sentences in their games.".

2. All negative examples/comments must remain abstract/fictional in order to avoid flame wars. So, no posting "The spelling in game XXXX by YYYY is just horrid!" as is "The way character UUU behaves in game XXX when doing YYY is just absurd!". If you have suggestions for individual games, I recommend you use the creator's thread or PM the creator to respectfully inform them. After all, there is no guarantee they will read this general thread.

3. Positive examples are welcome, though. So, you could point out "Taito's games show how radically you can change the impression of the engine by using original graphics."

4. No evaluating comparison. You can compare that one game focuses more on story while the other more on nifty design, thus giving radically different impressions, but you should not say one game is better than the other. Especially no "XXX's graphics are better than YYY's"

5. Remember that everything posted here are opinions. Thus, there is no ultimate truth and arguments may lead to dead ends. Be respectful of both the posters AND the game creators! Even if you feel strongly about something, that is still your opinion, and it does not give you the right to verbally abuse others.

6. No whining about lack of certain preference material; for instance, no "There are not enough games with male predators!" or "There are not enough same-size vore games.".

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So, to start us off, I want to say that I actually like the games created using Enterbrain's engine. However, I do feel that people sometimes are negligent about spell checking their texts. I don't know how the engine handles such input, but I would think it should be possible to use some automatic spell checker to go over a draft version before putting it into the game. And those who are not native speakers of English, please do ask people for help - I am sure that there are native speakers here who would be more than happy to proofread your texts and point out anything that could be misunderstood.

I don't belong to the faction who believes that original graphics are a must in an RPG. However, I do recommend that there is something unique/special about your game. Something that people will remember. Graphics (sprite animations, cut scenes, stand up graphics) and music/sound/voices are just one way to impress people. Other good ways include having a proper plot/consistent world, making a parody of something, having characters that are special in their personality. Given the nature of this site, an important aspect is the vore/UB/endo content, and there are many ways of how to integrate it and what to focus on. There are also some cliches/expectations people have and you may wish to subvert them in order to entertain.

Finally, remember that it is a dedicated engine, meaning that it has several default patterns that fit very well the main stream in that genre. However, all engines usually allow you to somehow give things a personal touch, so, once you have made yourself familiar with the basic structure of the engine, I recommend you check what things you can change about the default settings. These can be in-game things like elemental systems or special procedures for learning spells on levelling up, but it can also be meta-game aspects like having many save slots (personally, I recommend having a great number of save slots so as to allow the players to explore your game thoroughly).

Deathworks

[Takeshi]

Hi, just stating my irrelevant opinion yet again.

I am actually quite surprised that there are close to zero games based on the Game Maker or Multimedia Fusion here (actually, though, isn't Foxtale a GM game?). They were always, like, the first engine you could remember when you heard "I want to make a game, but I can't code well / don't want to do it from scratch". GM required a bit of coding though, MMF was mostly point-and-click development (its predecessor isn't called Click'n'Create for nothing). You could say - there's a miserable amount of default graphics - but there's always the Internet, lots of spritesheets, lots of free tiles lying around, waiting to be downloaded. Not that I recommend these development tools, but I remember to have had a lot of fun with them, even made a few playable games (most basic game types are kind of integrated already anyway). Just a curious observation.

I like the RPG Maker games, because straight from the get-go they can be pretty long. And gradually I got used to the style. And since there're a lot of them - there are bound to be some games to suit my preferences. I.e., when it comes to vore games (differs a lot from my usual gaming choice, for some reason), I prefer easy games with the delicious parts easily accessible (but just you wait, one day I'll play I.K. to the end...).

My favorite genre here are platformers (they're almost exclusively custom engines, or heavily modded ones) since so far, I believe, every platformer we've seen on the site was both coded well and drawn well. And their replayability is only shattered by a few other games around here, no examples given since the first post said not to. Although I don't think it's that hard to guess which ones I might be talking about.

So, just my two cents. I like every game that appeared here so far. Of course I'd like more custom engine-based games, but that is one request that is not easy to fulfill, so it should be ignored anyway.

Peace.

[Ranger]

I can agree here to an extent.

Yeah, the RPG-Maker and Enterbrain engines are good and easy to use for people with little game-developing experience, there's no argument there. I believe though that the main thing that bothers so many about the constant flow of RPG-Maker Vore games is the fact that the engine was never really intended to be used for something along these lines. Sure, you can get something that resembles Vore in a way, but in the end it just sums out to an engine being forced to do something it wasn't programmed to do.

Now, to add some advice, I would recommend that the people who want to make a Vore-Game first have a think about what kind of game they want to make first. I notice alot of the RPG-Maker games out there tend to not even bother with any RPG elements, and it gives the idea that the RPG Engine was only used because it was readily available and easy to use. If you're going to make a Vore Game, then first figure out how you'd go about it. A good example would be a game much like those Japanese Story-Games, where it's merely a series of dialogues and choices that end up with the Player experiencing something different that fits together into a small plot. This would likely be more suitting for the majority of Vore-themed games out there, since most of them just turn to the vore and don't really ending being much of a "Game" in the end. From there, have a look around for an Engine that is made for the type of game you're making, or put a little effort into studying a Coding language. You don't need to be an excellent Coder to make a simple game, and you'll learn as you go.

I'm not necessarily saying that the RPG/Enterbrain Engines shouldn't be used at all for Vore Games. I'm more saying that more consideration should be put into making the game correctly instead of seeming to jump on the first Game Engine available. A little planning beforehand can go a long way.

[Luigi2024]

I'm more saying that more consideration should be put into making the game correctly instead of seeming to jump on the first Game Engine available. A little planning beforehand can go a long way.

Agreed. I also believe that, for most people, a person's first video game shouldn't be vore games for two reasons:

1) To be effective, the games on this site need good aesthetics, in the form of creative writing, reasonable graphics and animations, and appropriate sound. The creation and management of these aspects is quite time-consuming, making the scale of the game too large for a first-timer.
2) Making a single big game to start out, rather than diverse smaller projects, may inhibit learning the full capabilities of the engine
With that aside, using a game engine typically allows for much faster and easier game development. One thing I noticed, in Vorpal Rabbit for example, is that memory usage grows the longer the game has been open, a phenomenon we refer to as "memory leak." Using game engines, especially well-developed ones, will reduce or eliminate memory leak and be less prone to bugs. Bugs can happen, but they are usually easier to figure out and fix within the confines of an engine.

In retrospect, some things you need to ask yourself when deciding on an engine are the following:
1) How much time and effort do I want to invest in learning how to use the engine?
2) If the engine requires scripting, how effective am I at creating and fixing scripts? Programming games is not recommended as a way to learn programming in general.
3) What kind of gameplay elements may I put into my game, and how effective is the engine at supporting those elements?

Lastly, I'll post an engine I use, as well as its pros and cons:

Unity (http://www.unity3d.com)
Pros:
Completely Free
Complete Physics and Collision Detection
3D
.NET and Mono (If you don't know what either is, don't worry about it)
Editor is both Windows and Mac, either can publish to both platforms and to the web
Impressive documentation and tutorials, including those aimed at beginning programmers
Drag-and-drop to create objects and add components to them.
C# integrates with Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition, also free.
Can be used to create games in just about any current genre.
Imports directly from Blender and Maya, but will take other models in Autodesk .fbx format

Cons:
Requires good programming skills (Javascript is default, but C# is preferred by more seasoned programmers)
Physics system is difficult to customize, can be imprecise at times
Not for Linux, even with WINE
Inability to debug line-by-line
No custom shaders or render-to-textures in the free version
Games will take longer to create than genre-specific engines (Game Maker, RPG Maker, etc.)

Conclusion: It's a good start for those serious into making games as a long-term hobby or even a career. Programming capabilities are a necessity, but there exist tutorials to get non-programmers comfortable with Javascript. As long as you don't need absolute control over every draw call and don't need custom shading capabilities, Unity is fairly full-featured.

[Aleph-Null]

I believe the link for the unity game engine should have been http://unity3d.com/.

Unity.com appears to be an electronics company specializing in optoelectronic devices.

[Luigi2024]

I believe the link for the unity game engine should have been http://unity3d.com/.

Unity.com appears to be an electronics company specializing in optoelectronic devices.

Fixed. Sorry about that. Should have known, considering I access the documentation on that sight, like, three times a day.

[KavenBach]

I have to agree with Luigi2024 on at least one point straightaway: anyone who wants to make a vore game REALLY has to know what they're getting into before even starting.

Some time back I was working on a game made of FAIL: "Geena's Trials." It was an expansive, overambitious Action-Adventure RPG-thing being built with, of all things, Game Maker 7. It was also heavily based on my own Damsel-in-danger (as opposed to strictly vore) interests. When I started it I had a good idea what I wanted as game mechanics and story flow; what I had NO idea about was how to DO it. The thing turned into a memory-hungry car wreck of a program that refused to work on half the users' computers.

I had done a few very quick things with Game Maker beforehand, but I had no clue how to use scripts or parent objects or external files. I learned some things as I went, but usually after turning what was already programmed into an undecipherable mess. In the end I managed three areas with a lot of crude art for the in-between and Game Over scenes, when the game was originally meant to be ten times that.

Further game attempts would also result in eventual loss of courage on my part. I'd get to a certain point, then lose patience with trying to fix things my less-than-genius mind couldn't figure out.

What I'm saying is two-fold, then: first, have a DAMN good idea what you're getting into if you start working on a game, vore or otherwise, and don't be ambitious at first; whatever your goal, it will likely grow beyond what you first expected. Two, don't quit (As I and pretty much everyone else, with a few exceptions he and there, did when working on games). No game will pop out fully working; they will ALWAYS have unexpected snags.

Personally I like Game Maker. While some people suggest that it is a buggy program --- I DID notice at least one strange mid-development hiccup, concerning screen transitions --- I could see that there was a lot of potential with it, for anyone with ANY skill at scripting (which is not me) and a firm grasp of programing concepts (DEFINITELY not me).

I can definitely say that many things I did wrong with Geena's Trials would have been changed and improved in future efforts; the problem was that I started far too big a project before truly knowing the program I was using. So, yeah... know what you're getting into before starting a game of any sort, and be willing to put in a LOT of time and effort for, truly, no return.

Quite the opposite, expect everyone to criticize and nitpick whatever you DO manage to create. No matter how good or complete your game becomes, there will always be someone saying it's not the right subject matter, it's too hard, it's too easy, when's the sequel, how dare you ask for donations, it was made with the wrong game engine, it smells like Tuna. It will be IMPOSSIBLE to satisfy everyone and you will even most likely offend more people than you make happy. Offend, because there will usually be more people the game is NOT geared toward then those for whom it hits all the right subect matter.

Duamutef and Taito have a TREMENDOUS amount of respect from me (and, I suspect, from many others) for not only creating their own fully-developed vore games, but for creating all their own artwork for it (or mostly?). That represents a SHITLOAD of work (considering they both do Scat, literally. ) and I am amazed neither ever asked for even a pittance in return. Most of the people who are most vocal about complaining about games are spoiled brats in RL and have no idea how much WORK goes into creating something like this. In fact I find it mildly amusing... nay, intriguing... that the people who caused this thread to come into existence are now avoiding it like the plague. Curious.

Long story short; creating any kind of game, vore or otherwise, involves a lot of time and effort, and is not to be undertaken lightly, or scoffed at either.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

There are some interesting things pointed out.

Agreed. I also believe that, for most people, a person's first video game shouldn't be vore games for two reasons:

1) To be effective, the games on this site need good aesthetics, in the form of creative writing, reasonable graphics and animations, and appropriate sound. The creation and management of these aspects is quite time-consuming, making the scale of the game too large for a first-timer.

This, I do not really agree with. As far as I know, people on this site do not jump and strangle anyone who isn't a perfect artist. If there is a genuine effort, I think people will respect it and reward it.

And the Game Resource Dictionary project of the Portal actually aims at helping people in finding necessary items they can't create themselves.

2) Making a single big game to start out, rather than diverse smaller projects, may inhibit learning the full capabilities of the engine

I am sorry, but you have lost me there. Why is a vore game automatically a big game? If you want, you can actually diminish the size quite comfortably.

But you are absolutely right that being overambitious is a very good project killer (^_^;;

Personally, as to the question vore game or no vore game, I see it quite the other way around: Creating a game, even a small one is a lot of hard work, especially if you have very little experience in programming. If you do original graphics or some such, you will burn out pretty quickly and motivation and energy can easily dwindle. Creating a game with a theme that really interests you from the bottom of your heart can help you hang in there, as the goal shines much brighter than just a game whose content you do not really care about.

In addition, I do firmly believe that putting your heart into any creative project will show in it and improve it. Thus, a vore game you created out of love is likely to be better than any other game you could create with the same experience/starting position.

The point you and Ranger make about choosing the right tool is something I can only subscribe to. I have tinkered with a lot of dedicated engines (mostly Japanese ones, but also English interactive fiction ones) - not only are the things engines for different genres offer radically different, but also their approaches can quite easily make certain things more difficult or easier to create within the same engine.

My personal advice on this would be to start out by playing games and see what the genres are called. The genres I have had most contact with are digital novels, 2D RPGs, and interactive fiction/text adventure and I am reluctant to suggest any classifications in genres other than that. So, if you have an idea about your game, try to find games that play similar to the way you want your game to be and see how people have classified them.

Then, search the internet for the available genuine freeware engines dedicated to that genre. Unless you have good programming experience OR a very exotic type of game in mind, you are probably best adviced to get a dedicated engine for the genre your game belongs to.

Once you have a list of candidates, I recommend that you follow the advice given by Luigi2024 and Ranger again: Make a list of the game elements you really, really need in your game. Do not add anything that would be cool but optional, but only those things that are really necessary to get the game play experience you have in mind. Take that list and have a look at the documentation of the engine candidates - do they support all those features you need or do they allow you to program them easily yourself? Do you understand how you have to implement them in that particular engine?

This way, you should get one or more candidates that should be adequate to your needs. Beyond that point, I think it is basically a question of how well you get along with a given engine's approach to things. Not all approaches sit well with all people. A good example would be my relationship to Inform 7 and Inform 6. Inform is a text adventure engine based on the engine used by Infocom back in the golden age. Inform 6 is the latest version of that engine itself. Inform 7 is a project in natural language interpretation where the text adventure programming is using grammar and formulations as close to normal human speech as possible. However, while bundling some aspects, Inform 7 itself is not an update of the engine - once you have designed your program, Inform 7 translates your human language program into Inform 6 code which is then run just as if it had been programmed in Inform 6 from the start on. Inform 7 has received a lot of praise by people, but I have personally never gotten really warm with it. This is also interesting as Inform 6 is probably my favorite text adventure engine.

Other examples I can point out are the Japanese engines for digital novels. They are very numerous, and they have various strengths and weaknesses. Unless your game is Japanese, the way text is presented can be a major problem. Nscripter, a very powerful dedicated engine does basically not allow English text, as it uses English keywords as direct commands in the scripts (I think there is a trick to circumvent this, but it shows). Other engines allow English text but do not allow you to use a proportional font. A few engines (Yuuki! Novel and Live Maker, for instance) use a virtual drawing board where each section of the game is an icon on a sheet connected with arrows to show the relationships. Comic Maker, on the other hand, divides the game into books and pages - but in exchange is highly visually oriented, using icons in its programming and giving you good tools to preview what the game screen will look like. And that is just one aspect of where the engines differ - depending on what you are up to, some engines may actually be completely inable to cope with your requirements.

Thus, picking the right engine can advance your project a whole lot even before the first line is typed into the computer.

Only if you don't find a dedicated engine that fits your bill would I suggest a generic game creation engine. Because they offer a lot of diversity, there is a lot of things you have to set up or clarify for the engine - meaning a lot of extra work. Unfortunately, my personal favorite in that section is also a Japanese one, namely 吉里吉里 - it uses a structured language similar to C++ and Pascal, is object oriented, and supports joypad input (yes, a feature I really love, especially for RPGs :) :) ). Another advantage is that it has graphics and sound support right from the go (the aspect that made me eventually turn away from C++). However, direct data file manipulation is extremely limited, so if that aspect is important for you, this may be a rather unfortunate candidate for you.

Moving on, I want to stress an important point KavenBach has made/stressed:

Creating a game is a lot of very hard work. And the great games of the community, like Taito's games have taken a lot of effort by their creators together with a lot of will power. In addition, those creators usually have practiced their skills a while.

Thus, you should not expect to start out with creating anything that comes close to those great achievements. I think you can be pretty sure that creating such an impressive game as your first game is impossible. But you do not need to. Just put your best effort in it, and I am sure you will be able to create a game you will like and that the other members of the community will also respect and enjoy (depending on their preferences, of course :) :) :) ). Have faith in your own intentions and skills and do not compare yourself with those who have much more experience in the business.

On a final note, my comments are directed at those who do not wish to become professional programmers/game designers.

Deathworks

[11millionseconds]

I'm going into engine development as a career so here's my two cents from all of the stuff I've used (mostly 3D):

1. Source engine: hard to use. Levels must be "sealed" upon creation which is a real pain. Hard to work with in the long run, need a license to release (mods are the only choice here). Lots of documentation for modding, but limited support exists beyond the basics. Hard learning curve.

2. Irrlicht: Not actually an engine in the strictest sense. More like a scenegraph if anything. Basically you have to code, and use the engine as a "library." Weird idea. Don't do it since you have to bundle together a physics library and then make sure all of your libraries work together. It's annoying and there's lots of data and code duplication.

3. Ogre: Never actually tried it but I hear there's many many variants. I'm skeptical until I try it.

4. Unity: Tried it. Not my personal favorite. Don't watch the videos and be impressed. It's a barebones engine. The scripting is really nice but simple things a person would want to do, especially in the editor, are lacking. No CSG (Constructive Solid Geometry) support from what I can tell, so you're better off creating your entire level in an external modeler and importing it as a solid piece and then adding details such as lights and physics objects. Does not support Lightwave models, seems to reject 3D Studio Max models without any identifiable reason, and only Wavefront objects are really importing for me. Sad to say, they're stripped of texture coordinate data which is really bothersome since it means all of the objects import with solid shades of gray and must be re-textured. Maybe I just didn't explore and troubleshoot enough, but it was annoying the way things didn't work right off the bat. Can't seem to figure out how to zone my levels and framerate is terrible even in places where the fillrate should presumably be quite high (like staring at the ground). Then again, I spent a couple of hours playing around with it. Maybe an experienced Unity user has the solutions to all of my problems. It's really easy to get something up and running fast with Unity, but seems to be really hard to take it places later on. It's hard to set up a good workflow for producing a game with it since some hard things are really easy and some seemingly common-sense things are next to impossible.

5. Unreal 2.5: Best engine I've ever used. Fairly stable, has built-in CSG, lighting tools, zoning, etc. A bitch to script with and to use from scratch, but modding an existing game such as Unreal Tournament is fairly straightforward. Lots of online tutorials and documentation. Things actually make a lot of sense. No annoying level sealing to worry about (The CSG operations always auto-seal the map). The editor PMSes like a bitch so save often because it likes to crash.

6. Unreal 3: Haven't used it, but honestly, it scares me a little. It's probably very nice.

7. Oblivion, Morrowind engines: Horrible. Don't use. Better to write your own. Every time you open the editor it's hard to suppress the "WHAT THE HELL WERE THESE PEOPLE SMOKING?" exclamation.

8. Writing your own. For 2D, it's really hard. For 3D, don't do it. Or PM me and I'll explain all of the little details that'll curb your excitement of coding a 3D game engine. Don't think that just because you have a neat little DirectX demo with dynamic lighting and bloom you can make a game. Try to imagine a real difficulty you'll encounter, such as how to intersect an ellipsoid with a triangle, how to cancel a sword-swinging animation if a character is knocked off a cliff, how to bind together an animating actor with a trailing particle system, or how to ensure that sound generators can't be heard through walls.

[empatheticapathy]

Hi!

There are some interesting things pointed out.

Agreed. I also believe that, for most people, a person's first video game shouldn't be vore games for two reasons:

1) To be effective, the games on this site need good aesthetics, in the form of creative writing, reasonable graphics and animations, and appropriate sound. The creation and management of these aspects is quite time-consuming, making the scale of the game too large for a first-timer.

This, I do not really agree with. As far as I know, people on this site do not jump and strangle anyone who isn't a perfect artist. If there is a genuine effort, I think people will respect it and reward it.

And the Game Resource Dictionary project of the Portal actually aims at helping people in finding necessary items they can't create themselves.

I think Luigi meant that in the interest of being erotic, which is what most/all the vore on this site in supposed to be, stuff has to look and sound good; not that graphics make the game, or that anybody is expecting hyper-realistic fit-to-hang-in-a-museum art in a freeware, ero-game.

[Luigi2024]

Hi!

There are some interesting things pointed out.

Agreed. I also believe that, for most people, a person's first video game shouldn't be vore games for two reasons:

1) To be effective, the games on this site need good aesthetics, in the form of creative writing, reasonable graphics and animations, and appropriate sound. The creation and management of these aspects is quite time-consuming, making the scale of the game too large for a first-timer.

This, I do not really agree with. As far as I know, people on this site do not jump and strangle anyone who isn't a perfect artist. If there is a genuine effort, I think people will respect it and reward it.

And the Game Resource Dictionary project of the Portal actually aims at helping people in finding necessary items they can't create themselves.

I think Luigi meant that in the interest of being erotic, which is what most/all the vore on this site in supposed to be, stuff has to look and sound good; not that graphics make the game, or that anybody is expecting hyper-realistic fit-to-hang-in-a-museum art in a freeware, ero-game.

You nailed it on the head. I wasn't trying to say that the art had to be perfect, but was saying that, for any moderately-scaled game, there is simply going to be a LOT of art. While I have hopes for the Game Resource Dictionary, it still has significant room to grow. I'll rephrase, and slightly correct, what I said in a previous post: a vore game, in general, has enough of a scale to it where a novice should have some experience in whatever engine they are using before attempting to start it.

However, I still stand by the point that, to make a game "complete", a game maker (i.e. designer, programmer, artist, whatever) should focus on four key areas to make a game immersive: gameplay, writing, graphics, and sound. I'm not saying that they all have to be perfect. Actually, what I am saying is that great use of sound and balanced gameplay can help a player enjoy a game that has mediocre graphics and writing. Take Bali-Balo's emaG-eroV, for example: while the graphics and gameplay are passable, the ambient sound and music help with immersion significantly. What I will say, though, is that the game maker shouldn't ignore the impact each of these have on a game.