this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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Custom engines claim another victim.
Game dev is hard. Game engines are apparently impossible and cost prohibitive these days, unless licensed out en masse. They're killing studios and franchises left and right.
Moreover: changes that big go in the next game.
If you decide to roll your own engine, from the start... awesome. Especially when content-creation tools aren't a huge deal, like if your game world is procedurally generated. Understand your scope, steal freely from existing libraries, avoid wasting your artists' time.
If you try to switch engines mid-development, you are fucked. John Romero couldn't make that shit work, just going from Quake to Quake II. Daikatana could have shipped before Half-Life and only missed colored lighting. Instead it's a cautionary tale. Duke Nukem Forever didn't even ship. They had a nearly-complete game, several times, but threw those out and started over.
You don't have to throw anything out, to start a new project from scratch. Ship the damn game. Put different tech in the next one. If you don't ship, there won't be a next one.
Duke Nukem Forever did ship... Years late and it was a total mess of a decade's worth of gimmick mechanics that killed the franchise, but it did make it out the door.
Still fits as a cautionary tale about switching engines, I just had to double check I didn't hallucinate that game.
A game with that title shipped. I don't think it was, in any sense, the same project. Not even as a ship-of-Theseus situation. A different studio started from scratch.
Duke Nukem Forever had wall-tits that you would slap and they give you health, and I'm pretty much going to remember that forever
Oh, I see what you mean, fair enough.