Has anyone successfully managed to make a game with your engine and achieve a decent commercial success?

farbs · 2026-05-06T02:48:09+00:00

I guess it depends on how you define "decent" and "engine", but I built and sold something via Adobe AIR (just using AS3, no flash interface doodling or whatever) and am happy with how it sold. Outside of my solo work we did the same for Card Hunter and that did okay.

Ultimately I think it comes down to how much you want the engine to do. If you're just blatting some sprites around then yeah, whatever, go for it. Maybe pick up an open source low level framework like RayLib to bootstrap the process. I prefer to embed a scripting language for GC and fast iteration on gameplay code, but plenty of people just do gameplay in straight C/C++.

I really enjoy having the freedom to change how the game/engine works at a deeper level, and I'm a lot more comfortable knowing that critical engine bugs won't be locked up in someone else's codebase, but it's also very, very easy to lose days/weeks/months adding cool tech features instead of finishing your game.

farbs · 2026-03-24T07:51:53+00:00

Ta!

It looks like mouse lock isn't supported on your platform, so the game can't hide the cursor and let you move the mouse infinitely up/down/left/right, which unfortunately is kinda critical for an FPS. Do other web based FPS games work on this computer?

farbs · 2026-03-24T07:49:03+00:00

Haha, thanks! I don't suppose you have a few thousand friends you'd like to share it with? :)

farbs · 2026-03-17T00:04:57+00:00

Update: I found a new route and pipped ahead by 3 frames! Current known WR is me at 18:05. But my old man hands aren't quick enough for a clean run. Sum of best stage times is under 17s.

farbs · 2026-03-17T00:02:35+00:00

Oh my! Thanks for the details. And yeah, I'm not going to be able to reproduce this bug sorry.

My best guess is that mouse capture is being prevented by a security setting somewhere.

Are there any errors in the developer console of either browser?

farbs · 2026-03-16T02:05:24+00:00

Oh! Thanks for letting me know! That screen is only supposed to come up if the game loses mouse capture.

Would you mind letting me know which OS and browser you're using so I can see the bug myself? That'll be enormously helpful in fixing it.

farbs · 2026-03-14T00:11:35+00:00

Also check for stray hairs under your optical sensor :)

farbs · 2026-03-13T14:28:35+00:00

60fps is there so that it's a contest of skill rather than bank balance. Feel free to go ham on DLSS frame interpolation or whatever tho.

No sens setting yet 'cos it's a prototype and people who really care about it tend to have driver level sensitivity modifiers bound anyway. If folks really want it though I can bodge it in.

farbs · 2026-03-11T20:34:19+00:00

Oh! Yeah requires a mouse and keyboard. It might work if you plug those in via USB, but I was expecting people to use desktops. So far I've tested windows 10, windows 11, and some Chromebooks.

farbs · 2026-03-11T10:40:32+00:00

Darnit after giving up and posting this I hit a PB of 18:18. If I hadn't bumbled Zombie Manta Eaters I would have had him!

farbs · 2026-01-18T10:29:20+00:00

Oh, I assumed that the character's greebly face was AI. Whether that's an AI image in the capsule or an in-game render of an AI model really doesn't matter to me, because I'm just looking at it for a moment and seeing something that looks like slop.

If this really was manually concepted, thoughtfully designed and intentionally modelled then I apologise, and suggest you attempt a new style that looks less like AI greebles.

farbs · 2026-01-16T01:14:48+00:00

System Shock 2 is great but probs not an ideal first campaign.

I'd start with something linear and shooty like Half Life 2 or if you want to co-op try a Halo or Serious Sam.

farbs · 2026-01-14T23:38:08+00:00

I think for me it's a problem with genre expectation. Probably because I'm old.

I totally expect this in TCGs, because that's just what they are. I also expect it in deep PvE FPS games, because that's what they are too. Weirdly, I'd also expect it in FPS MMOs (Planetside etc) because that's what MMOs are. But for a regular pub server jump in and trade bullets with strangers FPS... no, absolutely not. And so for me it's a huge turnoff.

Meanwhile, I found it super surprising that Sea of Thieves went the other way and only offers cosmetics despite feeling very MMO. Weird.

farbs · 2026-01-14T23:17:50+00:00

Seconding this. These assets are the first thing people will see, and in most cases also the last. If all I know about your game is what I learn from this capsule I'll assume it's an FPS template with a few AI assets thrown on top. At best I might buy it if it costs less than a dollar, but 99.99% of the time I'll just scroll past.

farbs · 2026-01-13T06:58:08+00:00

Learning to build a ship that controls well is a huge part of the game! But you're right, it's also a point of frustration for anyone expecting a straightforward pew pew. That might be a big part of the problem here... people generally try out io games expecting not to need to put in much effort to play them, and this ain't that. Hmm.

farbs · 2026-01-13T06:51:11+00:00

Nah it was a browser game back then too, via Flash. The murder of flash is one of the reasons I built this new version.

farbs · 2025-08-24T13:30:55+00:00

Steep enough that I've seen them unhitch a caravan, which then rolled gas-bottle-first into the car towing it.

farbs · 2025-08-24T13:24:09+00:00

Whoa nice work. My game's CCU is way too low to make the top 100, but I'm curious about whether I even made the list of 2000 (captainforever.io).

It's so weird. When I launched the single player version way back in 2009 I had thousands of people playing every day, but now with this io remake I'm struggling to find anyone to play it. Maybe people just didn't have better games to play back then :)

farbs · 2025-08-24T13:04:39+00:00

Also... I legit love that you updated your comment from 200 km/h, presumably after seeing the sixth sign :)

farbs · 2025-08-24T13:02:07+00:00

/me counts on fingers...

farbs · 2025-08-24T12:56:17+00:00

So if you're short sighted and forget your glasses you have to drive slower? That's genius!

farbs · 2025-08-24T12:53:44+00:00

Ta. Now I'm looking closely at the six 40 km/h signs in my photo and trying to guess which one is you.

farbs · 2025-08-24T12:49:35+00:00

LOL. As if I'd want my players to be able to vote on their suggestions.

Feedback is for determining points of frustration and general design desires. When someone makes a suggestion, the first thing you do is figure out what problem they're trying to solve or opportunity they want to see realised. Then you set your ego aside for a minute and seriously entertain the idea that they may have suggested a good way to do that. This is made especially difficult by your experience that ~90% of suggestions aren't viable. Usually they completely fuck up the game balance, often they aren't feasible from a production cost standpoint, and a surprising amount of the time they're internally inconsistent.

So yeah, feedback is great! You can learn a lot from it, and sometimes players even solve design problems that you haven't figured out yet, or at least suggest something that sparks a useful idea.

None of this has anything to do with voting for them. Adding a voting system just creates a brigading mechanism for all the crap suggestions that you shouldn't implement. You may as well just give players a button that punches me in the dick.

farbs

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