Comment on Anon is chasing an old high

• Sanctus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Let’s see, Secret of Mana? No third party game engine

  Chrono Trigger? No third party game engine.

  Final Fantasy? Hmm, NO third party game engine!

  Now its not necessarily the engines themselves that turns pixel art games into the same slop. Its the constant use of the inbuilt systems for movement and things like that. Thats what makes them all feel the same and not.like the games they are imitating. The movement is different because its a system built by the third party companies generically not hand crafted for the game. That alone works miles towards a game feeling unique.

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Godot, Unity, and Unreal don’t provide that kind of stuff, they mostly just provide primitives for things like hit detection, lighting, and physics. Things like movement are generally done by hand, unless the developer is super lazy and buys premade assets from an asset store or something. But then the problem isn’t with the engine, but the developer, and they’d release trash even if they didn’t use one.

    I’m not big into pixel graphics, I’m into good games. Here are some examples of good games I’ve played that happen to use pixel graphics, and the engine they used:

    • Darkside Detective - Unity
    • Oxenfree - Unity
    • Dave the Diver - Unity
    • Undertake - Gamemaker Studio
    • Celeste - MonoGame
    • Stardew Valley - MonoGame

    Those three examples you gave were made by major studios before game engines were a thing. They used pixel graphics because that’s all they could afford (FF was notorious for being multiple disks).

    I’m sure I could find examples in Godot or Unreal if I looked.

    My point is that it’s not the engine, it’s the devs. Whether a game is good has less to do with the engine used and more to do with the passion, budget, and time of the devs.

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    • Sanctus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Yes they absolutely do provide input detection

      https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.inputsystem@1.8/manual/index.html

      https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/enhanced-input-in-unreal-engine

      https://docs.godotengine.org/en/4.0/tutorials/inputs/index.html

      Using these in conjunction with their physics or even just their built in systems for positions gives games a certain feel.

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      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Input detection, sure, but even “no engine” games use standard input detection libraries, like SDL. I’m guessing the games you listed likely use the same library for that, and the behavior is probably identical to what Unreal, Godot, and Unity do. There’s pretty much no “feel” here.

        I’ve built games, I’m pretty familiar with what they offer here. Input detection just abstracts over hardware differences, so you can check if they pressed “A” instead of knowing that’s “controller button 7” or whatever. Most games will still interpret that manually (e.g. if “A” is “jump,” apply X force upward for the physics system).

        Physics is highly tuned by the developer, regardless of what abstraction they use, especially for simpler games where physics isn’t really a thing (e.g. older FF games just had simple object detection). You can achieve pretty much any feel you want with any of the standard physics engines, especially for simpler interactions like platforming.

        There’s no reason I couldn’t build a convincing reimplementation of FF or Secret of Mana in Godot, Unreal, or Unity. Generally speaking, that’s not the goal.

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