I Made the Same Game in 9 Engines

As I travel the Universe in my quest to learn about

game

development, I have decided to try out more

game

engines

that I have never used before and what better way to get familiar with them than to use them all to create the

same

simple game. So today we are going to create a space-themed Shoot Em Up on several well-known game

engines

and then compare their results. It will be a bumpy ride, but I think the journey will be worth it, so let's start with the first engine. What we are going to explore today is Click Team Fusion.

I had heard of the motor back in the day, but never seriously considered using it. Surprisingly, Click Team and its predecessors are behind some very well-known games. It is touted as a powerful scriptless engine. That allows even beginners to create video games quickly, so let's jump in. The first thing we will do is make our player move, this is really easy, all you have to do is create a game object and then in its properties check a little box that gives it eight directional movements. Next we will use the built-in image editor to replace the default Diamond Sprite with a drawing of a ship.

I'm going to challenge myself and just use each engine's built-in tools to do everything. the game assets and now we have a ship moving around our game. Next I will make a bullet and give the ship the ability to fire. To make that click the team has a simple but powerful event system, all we have to do is put an event on the ship that will fire the bullet when the space bar is pressed. Oops, let's change its origin. Point that is better demonstration work with the enemy. I'll just use a couple of events to move it diagonally a certain distance instead of reversing direction. do it in a zigzag across the screen and then we'll add an event that checks if the player's bullet is within a small distance of the enemy, if so the enemy will be eliminated in the

same

way, if the enemy gets too close to the player , the ship will be eliminated now so update the enemy Sprite and give it a trigger event that fires every few seconds, it looks like it's shooting every frame so we slow down, there we go, then we can create a second enemy, except this one can shoot diagonally, now we can add an event that spawns each enemy every few seconds and lastly we'll place some stars in the background, duplicate it and then use events to infinitely scroll the background behind the player so it looks like we're flying at through the depths of space and that's it. we have our little Shoot Em Up game running overall.

I really liked using Click Team Fusion. It's simple enough that it's not too intimidating to start a project, but it's powerful enough to make the game bigger and more complex, and out of all the event systems I have. I tried it, this is the one I like the most. The next game engine I'm going to try is by far the most requested by viewers. It's Roblox Studio, a 3D online multiplayer game engine. I actually wasn't that familiar with Roblox other than its reputation of being a kid-friendly platform, but after looking around a bit, I see that there are a ton of really great games and talented developers in the Roblox universe, so I was excited to try it out, but it turns out Roblox is a little harder to use than I am.

Basically, I thought that Roblox is set up to make it pretty simple to create a game if the game is similar to one of the provided templates, but if you want to create a completely custom or even very simple game from scratch, it's much more difficult because you have to deconstruct some features integrated in ways that aren't immediately obvious, but luckily a Roblox developer from my Discord offered a hand. Good Food Taco was kind enough to explain to me how the editor is set up and gave me some resources explaining how I could approach our project, so the first thing we need to do for our space shooter is change the default player model.

For now I'll just use a basic block. Then I saw a tutorial that explained how to make a fireball projectile. What you need to do is create a here and add a tracking object to it, then create a script for the sphere that spawns it in front of the player and adds Strength to it when a specific key is pressed. Next, we'll create some placeholder enemies and put a script on them where they will be eliminated if they hit bullets. We can also use Roblox's built-in scoreboard to give the player a point when this happens. Now we can build a small ship with the default shapes to replace the player. block and now our ship can slide and shoot, so we will create a target for the player to shoot while zooming and to make it look like we are flying, we can remove the floor texture and change the time from day in the workspace to midnight, now we can fly and shoot our enemy targets to accumulate points.

I think I'll leave it here for this game overall. Roblox is a super powerful and capable engine, and anyone can create a multiplayer mode. A game that could be played by thousands of players is awesome, but if you want to create a small, simple game from scratch that is not multiplayer, there are probably easier options and now we are going to create the next version of the game with buildbox, a somewhat game engine. newer that comes in 2D and 3D versions, these are some of the games that have been featured on their website, as far as I can tell, buildbox is mainly used to create mobile games and is advertised as the world's first software that actually It allows anyone to create amazing games regardless of their technical skill, so we're going to start with our Q player, then we'll rescale the cube to flatten it out, and then we'll put some wings on it.

We'll add some movement to the player's ship to do this, we'll use the visual scripting system built into Buildbox. First, we'll enter the ship's mental map, which is where the visual scripts are created, then we'll find a movement node for it. list of pre

made

nodes, next we will connect it to the start node that is already on the ship and we will change the configuration of the movement node so that the change moves in the Z direction in each frame and so our ship will move forward. We'll add nodes that check whether the player is pressing left or right and make the ship move accordingly while flying forward.

Dimple, we'll put a motion note on the camera so that it moves at the same speed as the ship below. We create an enemy for our player to shoot at, then we'll add a collision node that checks when the player collides with the enemy and another node to make the player explode when that happens. Now we will make a long, thin cylinder to act as the player's laser, and just like before, we will use visual scripts to generate the laser in front of the player and make it come closer. Wow, let me fix that, here we go and we'll give the enemy the ability to shoot pellets and then create an enemy spawner to continuously spawn opponents in random positions in front of the player.

In this version of the game, we will also generate coins that the player can collect to get points. Next, I want the game to look a little more spatial, so we'll change the ground texture and darken the sky box and that's it. We have a space shooter that works to sum up my experience with Buildbox. I must say that I really liked it. The visual scripts are easy to understand and you can also write traditional code with JavaScript if you want as a newer engine without a lot of commercial games under your belt. I'm not sure how capable it is for creating large, complex games, but for creating mobile games or beginner projects it seems like a great option. tool now let's change things up a bit and make the next iteration of our game with rinpai for those who don't know.

Rinpai is a very popular and open source game engine used to create visual novels; in fact, it is the fifth most popular game engine. The engine used in terms of games released on Steam comes just below Game Maker and RPG Maker Rinpai is considered very accessible and simple even for novice developers, so let's turn it on and create a shooter visual novel, we'll do a few first. Art, the game will only need a couple of backgrounds because most of the story will take place on the bridge of a spaceship, so let's spend some time working on the perspective and try to make it look spacey, then we can track down some photos that take. of Gunther and we will place it in the scene.

Then we'll add some color to bring it to life. We also need a couple more backgrounds for the opening and ending of the story. Next we will work on the gameplay to be honest, calling it Empire. The full featured game engine is probably a bit of a stretch because it's more like a coding template, basically what you do is write your story using a particular script format that rimpai can understand and display like a visual novel, e.g. For example, this line here in our script will display the title screen image, this line will display an image of Gunther on top of the background and this command will display a line of Gunther's dialogue, so we will use this format to create our dramatic excellent space encounter without further ado.

I give you shmup, the visual novel, thank you Commander, our sensors have detected an unidentified vessel in the vicinity. Preliminary threat assessment is unclear. What would you like to do, but Commander, could we conduct a more thorough assessment? There may be innocent life forms on board. You want Commander's cannons to fire, so yeah, rinpai is awesome, our next destination is a game engine called cryengine. cryengine is an all-in-one platform that gives you the power to create amazing and memorable experiences. It is an underlying technology in some well-known AAA franchises. and it's still a cutting-edge platform in the game development space, so I'm excited to try it out.

I thought you would be excited because, to be honest, of all the game engines I've tried, I had the most problems using cryengine. When you start the project, cryengine comes with a ton of built-in features geared toward creating first-person shooter games, which I guess makes sense. This means that for a space shooter like ours we need to undo some of those features, but to do so you have to alter some of the underlying code and logic in ways that are not at all obvious. After trying and failing many times, I finally realized that cryengine has a top-down third-person template that would be useful to start our game, but that's how it was.

It's still very difficult to make changes to it, for example it took me forever to find the place in the player code that specifies the size of the bullets the player fires and how far they will go. So I was able to model a rudimentary ship using the built-in design tool which is actually a really cool tool because it allows you to make complex meshes, but once I

made

the ship I couldn't figure out how to change the player's default model with our new ship model . I spent forever researching. but I kept running into dead ends.

I also couldn't figure out how to make adjustments to the camera or the player controller and had a lot of difficulty using the built-in visual scripting system to create additional features for the game, so after a few arduous days of trying and failing, I decided to cut my losses and leave the project where it was overall. cryengine is a very powerful engine, as proven by the amazing games that have been created with it, it has tons and tons of features that look really amazing. but unfortunately it's hard to figure out how to use them when you're just starting out and there isn't much information or tutorials available for beginners to help you learn, maybe one day I'll review it and try again, but for now it's time to move on.

After my experience with cryengine, I think my confidence has taken a bit of a hit, so to be safe, I'll revisit my old friend Unity to make the next version of the game. Unity is probably the go-to game engine for most indie developers and the one I'm most familiar with, it's a powerful and well-tested engine that can create virtually any type of game, so first on the agenda is , of course, block a player and then we will launch a script at him. to move it forward and check the player's left and right input, then we will make a laser out of a thin cylinder and to shoot it we will make the player block instantiate a copy of the laser when the player pushes the space. next bar we will create an enemy that looks like a germ from somepredetermined shapes.

I'm using more spheres and capsules instead of blocks in this version of the game demo. Write a script that makes the enemy shoot the player every few seconds. Next we will create an enemy generator and check for collisions between the laser bullet player and the enemies and handle those collisions, then we will get creative with our spheres and lastly we will try to make our background look like we are flying through space. We will update the ship model to make it a little more interesting. I think I like that and that's it. We've gotten our shooting game off the ground and working together overall.

I have to say that I really like developing with Unity. I just like knowing that no matter what kind of project I want to do, Unity can do it and whenever I run into trouble or get stuck, there is a wealth of information and resources available to help me move forward. in the next game engine that we are going to use on our journey is called Pi game. Now, the game Pi isn't technically a game engine, it's more of a set of development tools with libraries that help you create games. It's actually a bit difficult to find examples of commercial games made with pi games. but there are a few and there is a growing community of developers who use pygame because Python, its scripting language, is quite popular, so first let's start developing the game, because pygame does not have a graphical user interface, we will have to build our game completely. in the code, so the first thing we will do is set up a rendering window to display the images, then we will create a game loop, a game loop is basically all the code that runs during each frame of the game.

I'm using a basic while loop that will continue to run until the player exits the program below. I will create a Ship Sprite for the player. I am using a Sprite using any imaging program. Then, inside the game loop, let's use pygame's event system to verify player input. Now if the player hits left the ship will move left and if he hits. Okay, the ship will move. So we'll create an enemy Sprite that looks pretty cool. The player can shoot then we need to find some kind of collision system to determine if the bullet has hit an enemy.

The easiest way to do this is to check if the bullet is within a certain distance of them. If so, the enemy resets. a position again at the top of the screen and once again we have our cute little space shooter overall. I think pygame is a great tool for creating video games, especially if you're looking for something that lets you code in Python. I think using a traditional game engine is generally more convenient because it comes standard with many useful features, but if you want to build your game from scratch, the Game Pi could be a great way to do it.

Now we come to another game engine which is not exactly a game engine Pico 8 calls itself a fantasy console, consider it as a virtual emulator for a game console that never existed, it is designed to deliberately restrict developers to create 8-bit style games with limited graphics and scope, but even with these limitations or perhaps because of them some really cool pico8 projects have emerged, so let's give them a spin first. We'll go over the very simple interface. This screen is where you write the Lua code. This screen is where you draw your Sprites. This is your screen. a tile map editor for placing Sprites in the game and these two screens are used to create music and sound effects.

To start creating our game, we'll draw an 8-bit ship using the built-in pixel editor and then code some motion. To do this, we will next draw and code a small fireball for the ship to shoot, then create a starry background using the tiled map editor. We can use the same technique as before to make it scroll endlessly. Next, we will draw an alien invader. Use him as an enemy and we'll write code that kills the player if they get too close to him. Next, we'll program some movement for the Invader that makes it zigzag across the screen, and then create a second enemy type and code. some diagonal movement, we will also check for collisions between the player's bullet and the enemies and lastly, because we are having fun, we will create a third type of enemy to make the game more challenging, so that's it, our Pico 8 Shoot Em.

Up is working great to sum up my experience using Pico. I'd say it's really fun and refreshing to use a tool that's so simple and self-contained even though there aren't many built-in features, I don't mind because it's so charming and feels like a big win every time you get basic mechanics up and running. The last stop on our trip is a game engine called Copper Cube. I'd never actually heard of Copper Cube until I started researching this video, but it's advertised as a simple, no-code 3D game engine for developers of all skill levels. You're supposed to be able to get a game up and running in no time, so I'll put it to the test.

The first thing we'll do is make our default cube move around the scene. This is actually very simple, all you have to do is click on the cube and select third person movement. Awesome behavior, we can move the player and the camera crawls behind and then to make the cube shoot we will simply add another behavior that performs a shooting action when the player presses the space key next we will create some space marker enemies. position and we will add an AI behavior to them that makes them patrol a small area, then we can add a behavior that checks for collisions between the bullet and the enemy and an action that eliminates the enemy when hit next we will update the enemy model so that look a little better and just like with the player we'll give the enemy some shooting behavior at the end, create a better looking ship using some basic default shapes and just like we have another version of our game running overall .

I must say that I am pleasantly surprised by Copper Cube. It is very easy to understand how to use it and you can quickly create a small game without writing a single line of code, although it is not. the most striking or popular game engine. I really hope it gets more attention and love because it has a lot of potential, this is how to make the same Shoot Em Up game on nine different game engines, although this project was challenging at times. I had a lot of fun and I hope you enjoyed following along. If you want to chat with me about creating games in my growing community, visit my Discord and say hello.

See you all in the next one.