Choice of programming language etc.

[Kaj Sotala]

So does anyone have an opinion on the programming language / engine that would be best for this project?

Some people in earlier threads were recommending the Unity engine for its cross-platform compatibility. I haven't used it myself, but Wikipedia says that it "is able to support code written in C# or javascript" and that "The game engine's scripting is built on Mono, the open-source implementation of the .NET Framework. Programmers can use UnityScript (a custom language with ECMAScript-inspired syntax), C# or Boo (which has a Python-inspired syntax)."

I don't have any really strong opinion on the choice of language, myself: Java is the only language that I consider myself to know relatively well, so I expect to need to learn a new one anyway. Using some pre-existing engine would probably help make the programming easier, though, at least assuming that it was flexible enough for our purposes.

[DaFranker]

I think the "best" selection of game engines is heavily dependent on the style and genre of the game. By this, I'm referring to the overall set of how the user interacts with the game and what actions they do, and what kind of feedback they receive.

I think that, in turn, deserves a good round of "Hold off on proposing solutions before having thought about it" - unless you've already done so? I think this game concept already implicitly carries enough originality that it would be too much to also go with a novel gameplay / interaction scheme, so I figure something most people (who play videogames) are already familiar with would be best.

[DaFranker]

Oh, side-note I forgot to mention:

There are many good game engines lying around. Wikipedia has a handy list of some. Note that on this list "cross-platform" could mean anything from "Win + MacOS" to full-blown "Compatible with everything that can run JVMs, plus a few other devices".

[Jolima]

I've heard only good things about Unity, so that seems like a good default. But it should probably depend on the game genre like DaFranker says.

The conventional genres which seems like potential matches to me are:

• Third person adventure - The Blackwell series seems like a good match for this.
• 2D First person adventure - Similar to Phoenix Wright.
• 3D First person adventure - Myst is the first example which comes to mind, but there are probably some more recent ones as well.
• JRPG - just skip the random battles and go straight to the talking.
• Puzzle game - Constantly dedicating most of the screen to the belief network.
• Interactive Fiction - Just text, except for the belief network. Probably with a choice of options rather than an interpreter.

I'm favoring something like Phoenix Wright myself, which means: having a list of locations you can go to. Each location is a static image (possibly looping an animation) which have various points of interest, such as characters to interact with. Interacting with characters will overlay a dialog box. (note: I haven't actually played the game, so this may be slightly off.)

Mostly because it would be easy to do and because we can start with just text and add in the clickable images as we get assets. Also because I dislike the tedium of being forced to walk back and forth between locations in games for no reason which most of the others seem to require to some extent. (Unless the traveling is interesting or unusually beautiful in itself which probably shouldn't be a concern for this game.)

For that... I don't know, it could be that Unity isn't worth having a fairly big framework which we won't use much of.