Great suggestions. I agree that selecting “Desktop or Phone” and “2D or 3D” is not enough, simply because most of the games out there have many common, similar properties besides these ones. Of course the screen can’t precisely set up everything instead of you, but it should set up a good project settings / editor settings / ini template which is a good starting point for your type of game.
What might be a great reference is the way new JetBrains projects work. You select a framework, you select the most common plugins you would like to use (see attached), set up source control, and you’ll have a default project that’s relevant for your project.
For example if you currently want to develop a game which is using physics, the editor could ask you a few questions like:
- Do you need physics in your game?
- Is physics a critical game element of your game?
- Does frame rate matter in physics simulation?
- Is stacking, or energy conservation more important?
Et cetera, so even if you’re a beginner, you won’t face all the deepest and most disgusting parts of the engine in the first 15 minutes of development. Of course, in time, you can’t save people having to know what those parameters are doing, but I believe we should prevent them giving up on the engine in the first days, especially if all that’s missing is a checkbox tick, which is only mentioned in the 348th page of the answer hub in an unaccepted answer’s comment (but could have been easily deducted and set by the New Project screen if it actually asked if the developer wants localization support or not).
I also agree to update tooltips, but also in the project settings, like in physics “Enable Async Scene” says: “Enable the use of an async scene”. Wow. Unexpected. Thanks. Now I know if I need it or not. It could either be a short description when do we need it, why do we use it; and / or provide a link to a more detailed documentation. There are many tooltips which are great and very explanatory tho, others could follow the same example.