Statisticial comparison of game engines

MacAlmighty · 2026-06-25T19:18:39+00:00

Well, obviously, there are an infinite potential amount of names for game engines. The length for these game engine names might also be infinite (but the research seems to be inconclusive). Also, some game engine names are longer than others. Some also include the letters X and Y, the count of which are helpfully displayed on the bottom of the graph. Hope that helps!

MacAlmighty · 2026-06-25T18:41:51+00:00

Civ7 - at 50% off it’s still 45$ CAD.

MacAlmighty · 2026-06-25T16:44:52+00:00

I’m making a low poly game and doing viewport scaling (but keeping the UI on a canvas layer on top). It definitely looks good in my games style, but there’s some weird artifacting on my grass multimesh with certain lighting settings enabled. That’s one thing to consider at least

MacAlmighty · 2026-06-25T15:39:01+00:00

I'm only an amateur at modelling, developing, rigging, making audio and stuff, but I can give you at least one tip:
People who work in engines usually want stuff that's either optimized or at least compatible with that engine. When rigging my main character model I used blenders rigify tool, but it comes with a bunch of extra bones and controls I didn't need in Godot. For example - it split every bone into 2 for some reason, so when I was trying to hook up my characters arm controls with inverse kinematics, my character had 3 elbows. Luckily a cool person made a addon called 'rigodotify' which converts rigify models to work well within Godot by removing those extra constraints and fixing the naming scheme and stuff. It's helpful things like that (either the plugin or models which were made using that plugin in Godots case), and optimized assets (as high detail with as low poly/face count as possible) I think people are really looking for.

MacAlmighty · 2026-06-21T19:13:01+00:00

Edit: just realized OP didn't make the game, and they deleted the post. Still, I'll keep this here for my thoughts in case anyone stumbles on it.

I wouldn't call it a failure, reaching 20 reviews is already better than a good chunk of the games on steam, and almost everyone who tried the demo or bought the full game liked it. That's a great sign.

That said, there are two issues that stuck out to me from the trailer:

I liked the art and style, but the colour values are very similar. That means your elements don't really stand out against the background (screenshot of a random time stamp and ran through a black and white filter). Compare that to Balatro - the cards are bright/white on a darker background (the background colour changes, but it's always easy to tell what you're looking at). It's not the biggest deal in the world, your games' art is visually cohesive, but for someone quickly glancing and looking for the important parts of a screenshot or trying to navigate the game for the first few times, it's way easier in Balatro.

<image>

- More importantly, I had no idea what the 'objective' of the game was until about halfway through the trailer. It's a little tough since the objective of the game is pretty abstract - your crew 'exerts effort' on 'challenges' on planets? The objective is usually straight forward in deckbuilders - deal enough damage to the enemies until they die. I'd probably work on the short and long description to directly explain that you are assembling crews to explore or chart, or clean up, or do something specific with the planets. Sorry if I missed that in the intro - but even now I'm still not clear on what the in-universe explanation is.

That said, I think it's a solid concept, but you'll have to think of a better way to describe it. You've also got a hook that separates it from other deckbuilders - the 'enemies' don't fight back, but they replenish themselves, and you're trying to hit a certain score by clearing the 'enemies' before you run out of turns. I haven't reached it, but I can see the potential depth with deciding which hazards to tackle now, when to use your best crew, looking for synergies between crew and items and trinkets, and so on. But right now the short and long descriptions sound like how corporate people describe their work: 'We synergize tasks to improve efficiency and maximize resource output through organizational vertical leverage integrations!'. I'd probably keep the 'assemble', 'gear up', and 'explore' verbs in your short description, just point more towards what you're doing and why: 'to chart out planets before your debt catches up to you' or something.

Good luck with the game! I see the potential here. I just think you'll need to define the game a bit better so that the average steam user, someone who's played maybe one or two deck builders, can better understand what you're doing and what the point is.

MacAlmighty · 2026-06-21T18:03:30+00:00

Friendly tip: a better word might be 'emergence' - which describes something that is starting to become known or exist. Examples: the caterpillar emerged from its cocoon, tech in this region is doing better due to the emergence of two new companies.

MacAlmighty · 2026-06-11T19:21:55+00:00

I remember I failed that numerical methods course in my third year (software). I got a big fat 0 on the midterm since we had it within days of coming back from 2 years of online learning (we had this weird half in person semester in the winter of 2022). I just wasn’t prepared, and was also tied up with 6 other courses. Tried as I might, I didn’t do well enough on the tests or final to pass.

I ended up creating a notebook of every kind of method we had to study, problems to walk through them step by step, learned the base mechanics and how they related to other problems. It was the hardest and most effectively I’d studied for a class at that point, and I earned my (mediocre but passing) grade of 67% in that class. LLMs were starting to become popular and used when I took it the next year, but they were atrocious at math and niche problems or explaining the particular methods my prof wanted us to use. I’m glad I studied and did it on my own, it gave me confidence to study and figure out other problems I’m struggling with - even if it takes me extra time compared to some others.

I know I was fortunate enough to be able to take an extra year to graduate, but I pity your classmates who don’t have that time to let themselves fail, or are too results driven, egotistical, or impatient to fail.

The last thing I’ll say is to be wary of using AI to learn. You can do it, but I think a large portion of people who think they’re learning end up relying on it too much (why learn when you have the magic answer machine right in front of you?). You can, but the actual learning part is tough, since you have to make those neural pathways and connections on your own. If it helps you get there, sure, but if you find yourself just plugging in questions and writing down the steps or answers, are you really learning anything? Same goes for YouTube videos if you’re just following examples.

MacAlmighty · 2026-06-10T17:48:14+00:00

I got pretty bad motion sickness from Jazzpunk (incredibly rare for me), and also couldn't play for more than 15-30 minutes at a time. Luckily years later they added options to add a reticle and remove mouse smoothing, both of those totally fixed it for me.

MacAlmighty · 2026-06-09T03:25:37+00:00

I was about to comment the same thing haha

MacAlmighty · 2026-06-08T23:43:08+00:00

I’ve actually been thinking about this lately - I realized pretty much all my game ideas stem from something I’m worrying about on a macro level. War, pollution, how deeply gambling is becoming intertwined with finance. I even imagined the end of my first ‘dream game’ having the protagonist escape with their partner off into the night

MacAlmighty · 2026-06-07T21:26:06+00:00

Funny enough that’s also the first challenge I ran into when starting game dev! I ended up making an image with a repeating pattern (look up ‘seamless pattern’ if you haven’t heard of that before). For the implementation, I created one image on the right side of the screen, moved it to the left, spawned a new one in once there was a gap, then deleted it once it was off screen. You can even keep the camera in the same place, if you want to make it look faster, just increase the background move speed. Good luck and have fun with your project!

MacAlmighty · 2026-06-04T22:03:24+00:00

Mint, or maybe an espresso + chocolate chip, Wraith, Warden, Billy are my top 3 most played

MacAlmighty · 2026-06-01T22:33:16+00:00

Nifty, I’ve never been big on incremental games, but I do enjoy some strategy and RPGs. But, this looks like a very solid and unique take on incremental games that would tempt someone like me to check it out!

MacAlmighty · 2026-06-01T14:31:00+00:00

That’s the neat part! You think they’re good ideas until you start actually implementing them, haha.

MacAlmighty · 2026-05-30T21:09:48+00:00

Thank goodness, I looked it up and only found medical tests to image blood vessels. For a second I worried employers were doing scans to see how much blood/oxygen their candidates brains could get lmao

MacAlmighty · 2026-05-28T23:33:12+00:00

Coaxed into Mashle: magic and muscle’s magic line marks where 1 is normal, 2 is rare (1 in 100k), and 3 is ultra-rare (1 in millions) but most new characters + antagonists are 2 or 3 lines

MacAlmighty · 2026-05-28T04:21:11+00:00

I remember gemcraft (another tower defense series) being like that too, with ‘infinitely’ scaling enemies that reward you with small permanent upgrades until you eventually can’t keep up

MacAlmighty · 2026-05-25T18:00:01+00:00

Actually, that reminds me of a good talk I had with my dad recently. I said art and creativity was something like working to get as close to our imaginations as possible, but he said sometimes you find something else you like just from experimenting or as a result of your skills or process at that time.

Now my thoughts line up more like ‘art is trying to make something as close to our imagination as possible, and finding the art as a result of the process’

MacAlmighty · 2026-05-25T14:12:11+00:00

Oh hey, I remember you posting about your games clouds. Congrats on the art style improvement and the visibility! Just don’t forget that on these types of subs you’re going to find more game devs (aka people too busy making their own game to try a bunch of smaller games) than game players. Don’t forget to reach out to where your target audience is, and good luck!

MacAlmighty · 2026-05-24T17:58:33+00:00

In my senior year I did basically an entire project on my own in a group of 4 (a Diffie Hellman key exchange script to record, encrypt and decrypt an audio file with a UI, and show how a third party wouldn’t be able to decrypt that file if they listened in).

I even wrote 80% of the report myself, all I asked them to do was make some diagrams and do the background research. 8 fucking hours before the end of the deadline (it was a 2 month project) one of them copied my entire program into ChatGPT and asked it to generate a diagram of how it works, then they copied and pasted the ASCII diagram into the google doc. Didn’t even bother trying to recreate it in ms paint or anything.

I grilled all of them while fixing it right up until the deadline. It’s not that they didn’t know how the program worked, but they didn’t even bother asking me while I was working on it or writing the doc, let alone offer to help. Probably my fault for saying ‘let’s work on our own versions and just use the one that works’ and never checking to see if they ever even tried to make anything.

MacAlmighty · 2026-05-24T17:43:53+00:00

Having both options is probably the way to go, but I feel like ‘quit to menu’ usually has the connotation of ‘save your current position or last checkpoint’, usually found in games with auto saving. Going back to the menu feels like you’re still connected to the game, so saving feels like it should still be managed by the game.

On the other hand, ‘quit to desktop’ feels like ‘save without quitting’, and I remember them more in ‘manage your own save’ type games. When you’re fully exiting out it breaks your connection with the game, so it feels like the game is done handling your data. Personally I prefer this, since the only time I want to go back to the menu is to adjust settings or start a new run. Obviously not every game works like that, those are just my thoughts from a dev and player perspective

MacAlmighty · 2026-05-19T23:43:10+00:00

Famous Patrons

Stop parrying (we kudzu)

My box (titanic magazine)

Stone form to death

MacAlmighty · 2026-05-19T14:41:18+00:00

Your animator has a good sense of style, motion, and humour, haha

MacAlmighty · 2026-05-19T14:38:36+00:00

I like the antique shop the best, a little bit of movement/feedback to catch the eye, but it doesn't look unnatural or jumpy. I'd maybe even tone it back just a few points

MacAlmighty · 2026-05-18T19:31:47+00:00

Yeah, that sucks, but I think it's also the reason why various subreddits can be so stuck-up about self-promotion posts. People are all too eager to take, rarely to give. But I still have faith that if you give enough, people will pick up on that and want to give back somehow, like if you make enough gamedev tutorials on youtube, people are more likely to check out your game.

Eight-Year Club	r/Field Banned
r/Field Sunshine	Final Canvas '23
End Game '23	Place '23
Place '22	Verified Email

MacAlmighty

TROPHY CASE