You can work smart and still have to work hard for years to accomplish what you want to. I would say that making a good game is half of being successful. If you sacrifice making the game good you’re putting the game at a significant disadvantage. I think for experienced developers you want to try to make the game good in all areas of the game.
While using free assets doesn’t mean you can’t do other things really well, it’s a good indicator that the game isn’t going to be very good due to the huge number of terrible games made with free assets.
I don’t think that’s a problem the original poster would have.
Yes, if you want your own art style, you have to build your own art. Nobody can possibly solve that any other way!
But the original request, which was “I don’t know how to build art; I just want to build games!” seems like it’s totally well served by the marketplace.
I highly disagree. If anything, UE4 needs LESS of that game-specific stuff. For instance, the “Score” variable in PlayerState. Or the Damage functions in AActor. They shouldn’t even be there (though they are pretty much harmless)
Serious devs DO make games with UE4. Pretty much 1/3 of AAA games of last gen were made in Unreal Engine. And plenty of big UE4 games are in the works right now. Gears of War 4, Street Fighter 5, Sea of Thieves, Paragon, We Happy Few, etc…
I disagree with you … again. If you want bare bones engine, there are quote a few out there.
I love UE4 for exactly that - it provides everything devs need to make a game. No need to re-invent the wheel. If you can’t use existing core stuff UE4 provides, there is something wrong with your as a developer and entrepreneur.
Every game has a different way of handling these things. Sometimes it’s not as simple as having an all-purpose “Score” value. Sometimes Damage doesn’t work exactly the way it was implemented in those functions. Sometimes games don’t need Unreal Tournament’s ShouldShowGore() function which is present in AGameState. All of these things would only take minutes to implement on your own. It’s just a matter of keeping things clean in order to avoid clutter and simplify the learning process
I checked wiki and I see that only Infinity Blade titles were Epic’s 100%. UT3 was published by Midway, now defunct, so I wonder if Epic now owns 100% of that title. The rest were published under Microsoft and Atari (which acquired many other publishers Epic worked with before), so I am sure there is no way Epic can just release assets for those games.
Damage is damage. You can use basic damage UE4 provides and make a complex damage functionality with that. Same with “score”. It’s just a variable. You can make a new variable and do something else with it. However, if you need something like what UE4 already provides, it would save you time and trouble.
In other words, if you are AAA company you have a choice of Unity, UE4 and CE3, and Lumberyard. All come with source code (yes, for a lot of money Unity will give you source). If you have time and money and manpower, you can modify engines to suit your needs. Or you can write your own engine. If you are a small indie and you plan to make next, I don’t know, Destiny, then you should look in the mirror, think hard and probably either go work for AAA company or change industry or scale down your ambitions, and use what UE4 offers. Maybe one day you’ll have enough money for fully fledged AAA studio with top programmers to not use stock functionality any engine provides.
I think this conversation is going waaaay too far, with questions of what my opinion of the Score variable means for me “as an entrepreneur”, and talks of that same Score variable being somehow involved in changing the face of the games industry or rewriting an entire game engine. It’s a bit much, don’t you think?
What I’m saying is; clean code is better than cluttered, overcrowded code. That’s the takeaway of all this. Especially if the stuff you clean up only takes a few minutes to implement on your own, with the added benefit that you wrote it exactly the way you needed it to be, and understand precisely how it works, with no possible unexpected behaviours. If you start having several different Damage[Something] functions laying around because you had to keep the original one on top of the one you made, it just becomes confusing
I think the best way to handle all these things (Score, Damage, Abilities System, etc…) would be to distribute them through a free “Gameplay Basics” plugin. But having them in the engine’s sources seems weird. (though I understand that it’s just a relic of either UT4 development or past versions of the engine, and removing them would be very tricky/impossible now that many projects depend on those things)
I don’t really think you can get around the fact that creating a full game takes a lot of time and effort. It’s just the way things are. If you want a game engine that comes with guns and vehicles, maybe consider modding a game instead?
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OPINION ALERT!**
And, while this is 500% subjective, I’d say you would never benefit from having a bunch of pre-made assets for your game. It’ll result in a game that has no personality and no appeal. Just make the best game you can make by creating your own art assets (or have someone do that specifically for your project). If your ambitions are too high, lower your ambitions. Even if that means your game will just be dots on a screen. Agar.io pulled that off pretty well
There are game engines on steam that do exactly what you’re describing (was it GameForge? GameGuru? I forget the name). But you never hear about games made with that, for the reasons explained above
Anyway, stubs like “score” or “damage” may be a bit annoying, but really don’t get in the way much.
“Damage” isn’t always “damage.”
An RPG or FPS with a single health bar would work fine with that concept.
A one-shot-kill shoot-them-up could also be put on top of that, although the “perfect match” would be an “alive” boolean.
However, an advanced component-based damage system, like seen in Mechwarrior, can’t really be served by the “Damage” field, and the “Damage” field is just vestigal dead weight, with some small of confusing a new developer on the team.
That being said, there are tons of other features I may not use. I’m not a fan of SSAO at all, for example, and Motion Blur doesn’t work for VR titles.
Yet, do I think it’s “bad” that they are available in the engine? Not really. I’d rather take the engine that exists, and works, than no engine, or rolling my own.
…Why has nobody mentioned ShooterGame yet? It doesn’t have everything you asked for, but it’s a bloody good resource for learning how to make an online shooter. ARK is actually based on ShooterGame you know…
It’s C++ obviously, but that’s what all the cool kids are doing these days. Unreal Tournament is ‘Open Source’ in a way too, there’s more than enough code there to learn from.
I mentioned it, but is pretty bad sample if you look into the framework setup, can’t be used for most of the cases don’t have a proper setup and as I said before don’t have even crouch.
Someone that have made mods for even 2007 FPS games can see the huge difference here.
I would love more basic examples built into the engine, especially for fast prototyping. A core set, like the examples already given such as the vehicle template, would help iteration in the early stages a great deal. As I am primarily a coder/bp, I often sit at a loss for some base assets and go trawling free model sites for hours/days just to get some content to play with.
I know it’s never going to be a priority as its a game engine and they want to drives sales through to marketplace, but it would be nice. Maybe someone in the community could start a project.
