Anteworld - Outerra Game > Game & gameplay discussion

Future of the game - III

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Revolver:
To predict it "Anteworld", must have finished first a Engine. Do we have a finished OT - Engine? No. So, wait and drink the Tea ... everything for his time. :P ;)

fooff:
I was accidentally watching this video about game developer mistakes.
I don´t know the developers of Outerra, but i´m fairly confident you are experiencing mistake number 5: getting stuck in perfection.
https://youtu.be/DbySIjG_wgg?t=665

Outerra engine is not finished yet, but it is good enough to support any game.
If developers REALLY want to go on wit the Anteworld game, they could have started anytime, but for some reason they prefer to tweak the engine until it is a perfect replica of the world.
If that´s the spirit, I can already tell the developers that you´ll never reach anywhere: the real world is way too complicated to simulate exactly and if you really wanna finish (start) a game just accept that the engine won´t be perfect any soon, and start with the game with what you have realized (which is already very, very good).

If, on the other hand, you are not really interested in developing a game, please just say that and continue to tweak your engine, I wont stress you any further.

Avi:
Well I think that the developers aren't really tweaking the engine to make it look pretty or exactly simulate the real world but rather improving the engine enough so that other game developers can use the engine to achieve whatever goals they have got. No developer would put out their product before being assured that it has enough features or has enough juice to create something worthwhile. Outerra is one of its kind and we are all new to this vast engine so we may still be missing a lot of technical details that the developers are trying to combat to render Outerra a true game changer.

Occams Razer:
I'm going to chime in on the 'more gameplay' side of the debate. I get that the devs want to polish off the world before building a game, that they plan to contract the engine out to other projects (so an extant game isn't necessary), and that Outerra's sandbox status allows for a variety of possibilities. However,

* The world is finished enough at present to at least start creating gameplay. A game is still a big project, and leaving it until last will probably prove a poor choice.
* An engine should still prove it can pull off complicated gameplay features, and come with support for more common features like inventories and AI paths.
* More gameplay features won't hurt the nature of a sandbox. A game might, gameplay shouldn't.
* Not terribly many games want or need an entire planet as a gameplay location. Simulators might be able to make use of it, but most simulators are created by big companies that can afford to create their own tech.The archery minigame was a step in the right direction, but it didn't offer objective-oriented play or a failure state. It can't be ended without leaving the game, and because it's triggered by a keyboard shortcut instead of a menu, content creators can't create their own minigames without overwriting the original or other community minigames (not that there are any, but still).

Also, while I like creating content, I can't really rationalize it as an alternative to gameplay. Building structures and plopping roads is fun, but if my beef with the current state of affairs is that I've got a big, beautiful place I can't play in, building my own big, beautiful place to not play in doesn't really solve my problem.

cameni:
The problem is that in order to be able to secure funding for the ongoing development, we have to work on the engine and on the world (and simulation aspects, physics etc), licensing it to selected consumers as that's our main source of funding. A whole world engine and also any game development on it costs a lot of money and we'd never be able to pull it off just from the early access sandbox sales, which make up just a tiny fraction of it. Other funding methods exist but everything has risks, and the biggest risk is us not being able to reliably estimate the amount of work needed for anything, and I believe we would eventually sink because of overly ambitious project unable to keep funding itself.

And that's basically it. While we would like to spend much more time on a game or on the gameplay functionality for the engine the game depends on, we have to balance it until the situation allows us to expand and spend more time on games we want to make, or a magic investment turns up that doesn't suck up our souls. Licensing was never our primary goal and we are reluctant to enter into any new agreements that would force us to support old versions and take even more time from our hands.


--- Quote from: fooff on February 06, 2018, 11:33:49 am ---If developers REALLY want to go on wit the Anteworld game, they could have started anytime, but for some reason they prefer to tweak the engine until it is a perfect replica of the world.

--- End quote ---

--- Quote from: Occams Razer on February 07, 2018, 12:26:03 am ---I get that the devs want to polish off the world before building a game, that they plan to contract the engine out to other projects (so an extant game isn't necessary), and that Outerra's sandbox status allows for a variety of possibilities.
--- End quote ---

This oft mentioned polishing - most of the projects that need the whole world do not require any more polishing, sure they could use it but everybody realizes it's a compromise vs the world scale, and what matters are the capabilities. We would happily release a game with the current state of the world. Well, maybe that would not be such a good idea without 3D trees unless it's a simulator, but anyway.


--- Quote from: fooff on February 06, 2018, 11:33:49 am ---Outerra engine is not finished yet, but it is good enough to support any game.

--- End quote ---

I wish. Maybe it looks good enough, but the infrastructure needed for any game is still not sufficient. The gameplay elements we deem necessary, in various stages of development:
[*] easily extendable multiplayer code
[*] scriptable gameplay objects, compatible with the networking and with the large world scale
[*] character controller that can handle open terrain but also interactive cockpits
[*] helper stuff that can e.g. automatically drive cars on roads or navigate them
[*] ...

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