I don't like the gatekeeping "make games, not engines" attitude. People want to hack on projects that are interesting, and low-level game code is interesting. This isn't a case in which where people can get hurt or lose money if the project doesn't work, like Cryptocat or Mt. Gox or whatever. For a project like Amethyst, the worst thing that can happen is that we discover that certain techniques don't work well for games in Rust--which is itself a valuable result!
It really rubs me the wrong way when I see comments like parent telling people what they should do with their open source projects.
However, as a game developer, using an engine without some substantial dogfooding (or orders of magnitude more use by third parties, ala Unity) is simply a bad idea. I have done it multiple times and each time it's burnt me.
If you were trying to sell this as a commercial product, I'd be right there with the parent comment. Since it's not, I'll just take my hit of dopamine that I live in a world where cool stuff like this is being worked on, and add it to the list of stuff I'd like to play with.
>However, as a game developer, using an engine without some substantial dogfooding (or orders of magnitude more use by third parties, ala Unity) is simply a bad idea. I have done it multiple times and each time it's burnt me.
Definitely don't bet your company/livelihood on an experimental tech. I will say that as a general philosophy, we are far more concerned about correctness and stability over rushing to get a product out to satisfy investors. Not having to try to convince people to buy an unfinished product to satisfy investors is one of the advantages of being a non-profit.
We'll get to the point of being production quality, will just take some time.
I 1000% support people hacking on things to learn.
But I don’t think Amethyst is a “just to learn” thing. They setup an actual foundation. There are sponsors. A lot of work has gone into a website and documentation. There is community outreach.
I really dislike the negativity of the internet. I don’t want to be a negative Nancy. I want Amethyst to succeed and be a useful tool in the Rust gaming ecosystem.
But right now I’m not seeing a path to that. I don’t think the engine makers need to switch focus to shipping an actual game. But I do think they need to clone a bunch of existing games with their engine to find the weak points.
Show me a page with Amethyst clones of Pong, PacMan, Super Mario, Doom, Warcraft 1, Quake 2, etc. Not complete games of course. But sufficient to convince me that a full clone could conceivably be made.
None of that invalidates the core issue that "trying to make a general purpose engine without a game is a BadIdea™" ("...if you want it to be used by other people" implied) is a pretty strong belief among experienced game developers.
OTOH there's Unity, who never developed a large game themselves, only demos and samples.
