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...
What engine are you switching to? I wanted to create this type of game for myself and but i don enjoy coding, and was looking for an engine easy enough for a designer not coder, and construct tured out to be perfect for me to understand, but i was wandering what made you change it? Is it scale of the project, im wandering if C3 is good enouch to handle this type of game and scale it can grow to.
Multi part reply coming cause apparently I can't go over 1000 characters.
I've been reworking the game in Game Maker 2. I was between using Game Maker and Unity, but I think Unity has a lot of bloat at this point as an engine. Also Unity seems to be (or was) engaging in some sketchy business practices of late. Game Maker also caters more fully to 2D games I think, but either would be a good option.
I don't want to dash your dreams so take what I say with a grain of salt. This game is currently on Steam and Itch.io for reference.
As far as I can tell, even with the project getting as large as it is Construct doesn't seem to have an issue keeping up. For reference, this entire game takes place in a single massive layout. It dynamically loads and unloads all the stuff you see as you move between areas. The fact that it can do all this without seeing significant technically issues (that aren't just bugs in my code) means the engine can support a game of this scale.
I have effectively run into two issues. One that is an actual issue, the other which is more just unfortunate. Although these two things are sort of tied together and could potentially be alleviated in the future, or maybe I just didn't investigate enough.
To explain. The problems I've seen with the Steam release in particular is that some people just have issues running the game. Not like they run it and it lags but weird things like it booting to a black screen, not opening and closing properly, etc. Stuff that, based on the time I spent looking into it seemed to relate back to particular graphics cards working with the NW.js export option. Which to my knowledge is the one you use when you want to port to PC.
Aside from this there were minor little things that always sort of bothered me. NW.js is basically just a chrome window running as a desktop app. That came with weird stipulations surrounding the mouse and updating the window size, setting fullscreen, etc. Nothing major, just minor little annoyances in my mind.
Now, all of this aside the other issue, which really only became relevant in the more recent console gens I think is the porting issue. If you weren't aware you can't really (to my knowledge) easily port your Construct game to consoles like switch, xbox, and playstation. This may not matter to you at all, but if you are looking to make money you are cutting out a huge chunk of the market.
Back when Construct 2 was the engine here I believe one of its main selling points was that it could be easily ported around because the base of the engine is HTML which is a fairly universal language. What Scirra likely couldn't predict is that consoles decided basically within one generation of hardware that they didn't want to support HTML anymore which kind of killed the whole idea.
Now. I will say, if you want to use C3 and still port to console there are apparently options. The link below is an example of one.
construct.net/en/forum/construct-2/general-discussion-17/chowdren-fast-construct-134395
I don't know much about it, but it seems like a third party porting option. This likely works fine, but as someone who works in computer science, I don't tend to like pushing a program through another porting program to get it to work. There's the danger of something breaking obviously, but there's also the concern of losing efficiency because you are basically taking code that is made to work in one language and transforming it into another. Something like that usually doesn't happen cleanly.
I don't want to slight the people who make porting programs like this, I'm sure they are very smart (likely way smarter than me) and capable, it just makes me nervous. More so when I think about how the entire game I'm working on is reliant on not just the engine I'm making it in sticking around, but now a separate porting program to actually get it to run also being around and keeping up with any changes to the C3 engine it concerns me.
Basically, too many layers for me to be comfortable. Also, while they don't outright say it I have to assume that using a porting program like that probably costs a pretty penny to do a base port and potentially some sort of additional fee each time you want to patch it (but that's just speculation).
All this said, the game in this engine also had more than a few issues in terms of my code. I learned a lot as I made this game, but by the time I realized some of the things I did wrong it was far too late to change them without ripping everything out. Remaking it in a new engine provided an opportunity to fix those issues and make other changes to the game as well.
Last thing, which may not matter if you aren't looking for a more simplified engine. C3 does a lot of stuff to simply things for the coder. If this is what you want its great, and don't let anyone tell you that you can't make a game without directly writing code, they're completely wrong. However. In simplifying things you take away options which in turn creates restrictions. The most obvious example of this is the sprite in C3. The sprite basically works as both the object and the image in C3. Its a bit hard to explain without going into even more detail (and this is already super long) but by tying everything together like that you lock in a lot of details, disallow things, and also likely cause some redundancy in your assets. None of this is a death sentence but it can be restrictive.