You've washed ashore in a foreign land. With nothing to your name other than a few tools you’ll have to learn how to live off the land. Explore, grow crops, and...
So basicaly you had to create the game from scrath in another engine ? And was it Unity? Im also thinking it such an game would be possible in eg. Ureal, with i'm little familiar with video work. But it is also huge engine with so much stuf i dont really need i think.
I know what you mean in terms of wanting an engine that isn’t just staring at lines of code. It’s the same thing that drew me to Construct way back when. Unity is definitely not going to be your friend when it comes to visual coding. I can’t really think of any other engines that have visual coding built into them as a baseline. I think Game Maker has a visual version, but I’m not sure. Outside of that I think RPG Maker is more of a visual engine. Although I think if you want to do much in RPG Maker you’re forced to start doing scripting.
As for AI and ChatGPT and such, I’m not sure you’ll have much luck. AI can do some neat things, but I think its abilities are largely over-exaggerated. When it comes to code you can tell ChatGPT to write code for you, but to my knowledge it can’t get anywhere close to the complexity you would need for a whole game. I believe its better at automating little tasks within coding and even then I’m not sure I’d trust the code it writes.
Unreal would also be more than capable of running this sort of game however I think Unreal caters more to a higher fidelity of game. I’m not sure its made for pixel art and 2D but I’ve never looked into it. Maybe you don’t want to do pixel art though, so that may not matter. Regardless, Unreal Engine falls into the same sort of space as Unity I think where the engine is incredibly powerful, but there is a lot of bloat going on.
As for me I’m using Game Maker 2 to make the new version, and yeah, I had to start completely over. I still have all the sprite assets and stuff of course, but the code has to be entirely redone. That was part of the point though as, like I said, I made plenty of mistakes in the Construct version which I couldn’t fix because they were too buried in the code by the time I realized.
At the end of the day, honestly, no matter where you look on the internet you will find people debating engines and which one is good and which one sucks, etc. No matter what engine you pick there will be people who will tell you ‘That engine is terrible, you should never use it’.
My advice, ignore them. Pick the one you think works best for you, and work within it. If there was one thing I learned working C3 its that in almost all cases the issues I ran into were almost always ones of my own making and not the engine.
Also, as an additional note since you mentioned it. Multiplayer is one of the harder, if not hardest things to implement. If you want your game to be multiplayer you have to plan for that from the start. I suggest you approach everything in your game as if multiplayer was mandatory.
Also, because of how Construct works you can’t have players in a multiplayer session on different layouts. So, unless you want to limit all players to being in the same area of your farming game you have to make one big layout with all the individual rooms inside that layout. Then you break it up via artificial transition points in the world where the game can dynamically load and unload assets into the world because if everything was loaded at once it would have performance issues. I can say with certainty that this can be done because that’s how Verdant Village works.
Quick visualization for you, the link below is screen capped from Verdant Village. That’s what the game actually looks like. Its all one layout and each of the little boxes is a separate room that loads in when you enter it. So only one of those places is ever loaded in at once. You’ll need something like that, at least in Construct you will.
ibb.co/DDvghRB
Looks Epic, thank you realy for making time to answer, after little roming over the internet, i realized my situation is not so unique, there are many ppl looking for a visual scripting engine to create their idea without coding so much, but i think after what you said this is unavoidable at some point you have to have someone look it over and fix stuff and optimize couse whaterver i do it wont be elegant and optimized. And the conclusion is if to do it seriusly one should find a partner that fills the blanks with coding and team up. But i kind of also get why so many of us wants to do this alone, its a terapeutic kind of ZEN state we like to be in with our ideas, probably because of being on some spectrum of autism or sdhd or both... we dont like share ideas and give someone a say in what has to be :D
And the Multiplayer as you saind its most difficult i kind of already figured it out cause so many great games dont have multi at the start, like Hydroneer an amazing game where the dev after years cand find a way to implement proper multiplayer. But my idea kind of would work on split screen and as you said it could work by beeing on the same layout doing stuff together, thats the whole point of the game.
Again thanks so much