This is an outgrowth of what became a really big twitter thread.
We’re looking to develop games on two major tiers
- Big, beautiful PC/XBox/PS5 games with our xbox360/PS4 style art.
- Smaller, simpler, more portable games based on smaller consoles with scaled back art.
The trouble is that targeting group 1 with UE4 is really easy, but it’s much harder to target Nintendo, Evercade, Raspberry Pi, portables and small consoles of all sorts with UE4.
We’re totally on board with having 2 different engines for our base, but the issues is finding that lightweight engine. So far the issue is that the engines that excel at smaller hardware don’t work with xbox/ps5 at all (therefore it’d be a totally different codebase and art base between the xbox and switch versions, for example), and the ones that do larger hardware don’t work with ARM-based hardware properly.
-
Our first hope was Unity, since it’s a big solid engine that’s geared towards older/smaller hardware. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do Pi (or any other Linux/ARM) very well at all apparently. This means it wouldn’t work on all those great consoles out there that are so ideal for small game experiences, and currently just run Retroarch or similar.
-
Second hope was Godot, but unfortunately it’s not considered “compatible” with UWP by MS, therefore it is excluded from things like the Creator’s Program and requires porting.
-
Third was Game Maker which seems to tick many of the boxes but with a lot of limitations and a huge cost on top of a wacky proprietary language. Over a thousand dollars a year, regardless of sales.
So, tl;dr:
We’re still shopping for a low-spec engine that’s Linux/ARM/OMAP/x86 friendly that ideally supports at least xbox so that we don’t have 2 engines for console support.
