Recente recensies door Feniks_Gaming

Games controls are broken. Icons you need to click on are displayed however their hitbox you need to hover a mouse over are in completly different place. It makes games imposibile to play

Godot is a lot of fun and I enjoy using it. GDScript is easy to grasp for new programming. If is python like but it also added a typed option for those who prefer more static languages without wanting to go full c#.

Godot 2D support is good for what I need from it. The fact it works uses pixels and seconds as it's measuring units is great for planning games. It enforces use of Delta from a start. Something which is very complex process in for example Game Maker, Engine I have been using for a while prior to switching to Godot. With new changes like move and snap to kinematic body and pseudo 3d parallax backgrounds it's actually better that what Game Maker offers. It's likely the best on the market right now. A lot of work has been put into this and seems like community is interested in contributing more.

At the same time even improved tile set editor is still lacking. It's better than it was but it still lagging behind some other engines. You will likely want to build your own tool to build complex large levels. Luckily editor allows you to do it. Also there is no in game Sprite editor so you can't just make a quick prototype like you can for example game Maker it may not be a huge issue but it's worth mentioning.
Node system is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ mind blowing. The more I use it the more I am amazed by it. Everything can be its own scene which is like a prefab in other engines. Think of it like this - You are making an Enemy your scene tree will look like this

Enemy
Fireball_attack
Sprite
State machine
Particle_emiter

Etc. Now say you want to change your enemy fireball_attack to ice_blast all you need to do is create new node ice_blast replace fire_attack and you are done. Your fire_attack is still it's own scene so you can even give it to a player or a cannon or whatever else you want. You can reuse multiple components from one object to another with ease.

Signals and groups are awesome it allows you to decouple objects from each other. If I fire a gun in a game I can send signal "gun fired" and I don't have to worry if there is any objects that uses it. If there is one they will do their thing, if there isn't nothing happens I emitted empty signal. This furthers helps with modular design and helps keeping objects separate. So I can send gun_fired signal and have a guard listen for it if they are in proximity of player they start chasing them.

AnimationPlayer is amazing. You can animate any aspects of your nodes. Any property of the node can be animated via animation player. Things like nodes position, modulate values but also things like change gravity, toggle and untoggle collision layers etc.

You can also execute functions directly from a player. For example you have an enemy with a death animation. At the end of an animation you can just indicate to play function for queue_free() to get rid of the enemy node or any other function you want. It allows you great visual control of what you are doing.

Godot is in top 5 fastest growing projects on Git. If it continues like this becoming familiar with it now can open many opportunities year or 2 down the line.

At the same time this very fact is Godot biggest problem. Engine evolves so quickly that tutorials struggle to keep up. The way you did things a year ago is not the same way you do them now and will be different to how you do them next year. This makes learning engine hard for new people.

In my personal opinion documentation is Godot's greatest downfall. There are too many assumptions made about users pre existing knowledge. Things are unexplained at times and require users to have an understanding of programming from elsewhere at times. It's often build from a perspective of engine builder rather than engine user. For example it tells you what things are not how they are designed to be used. Some things are just bare bones finding few entries of "Thing", "Description: This is a thing" isn't uncommon.

In my personal opinion what Godot developers should focus on next is bringing Docs up to standard to match something like Game Maker 2 documentation which is in my opinion one of the best written technical docs I have ever seen. If 1 developer spend a month or 2 after release polishing the docs so users who haven’t worked closely with the engine could get up to speed without needing to jump on discord to ask for clarifications. At this point I believe that documentation contributions need to come from a paid developer. Godot community would love to have better docs but noone wants to spend time contributing to it. I get that the majority of contributors are volunteers who want to do exciting things rather than write clear and explicit docs. It takes a long time and is not very rewarding as no one will praise you for a new doc entry as much as they will for an engine feature or bug fix. Discord is great for support in those situations when docs are failing but let's be honest it’s the ideal solution.

Multi platforms releases are a breeze. It's easy to release on multiple platforms without much extra work or buying new licences. Consoles however are unsupported. This is due to licensing issues on consoles not Godot itself. You may have issues porting there if this is your niche. Over time I expect companies to start offering it. But at the moment this isn't a case. Same goes for larger collaborations there is more and more people using Godot but there isn't that many using it at professional level to be able to build larger studio with good experience. As a result we don't have many( any?) large games made with Godot, so it's hard to judge what roadblocks and limitations you will hit on the way.

Community can be strange at times depending where you go. Majority of people are great and supportive, discord is much better if you need help than anything else. However there is always few insecure kids with "GoDoT iS GoInG To DeStRoY UnItY". It's rare but every now and then you come across it. I am pleased to notice that over the course of the past year community woke up to the fact that "It's open source you can fix your issues so you can't ever complain about engine" is not helpful and I haven't seen almost any of it over the past couple of months. Community is much more willing to listen and suggest solutions rather than bash you and tell you to submit your own Pull Request which was more common a year ago. It's great and I hope it continues.

Godot is also willing to accept grands so if you have some money to throw at it you can speed up the changes you want to see. You could possibly even assign someone in your studio to implement changes and submit PR and have them mainstreamed. Main developers are very engaged and would likely support your team member with a work that needs doing to a degree.

Strings are annoying and they are everywhere. You find them in path references, in referencing a function in other objects via signals. I wished those were eradicated in future releases. It makes it unnecessarily messy plus if you move things round path references break and you need to manually hunt them down.

Another thing is editor itself it gets better with each release but for me it severely lacks multi screen support. It is planned for Godot 4.0 though so I am glad that at least plans are in motion.


Over all I believe Godot is more than capable of accommodating the needs of single devs or small studio and will improve over time. If you are making 2d game there is absolutely no reason not to use Godot. Big advantage here is that you are unlimited by a license you have 100% creative freedom of what you make and no one can stop you. Finally the open source nature of an engine results in disproportionate support from gambling services. Majority of platinum sponsors are gambling developers, I am not bothered by it but I know there are few people who don’t want to be associated with this kids of sponsors so it’s important that you know.

I have enjoyed playing this game and I belive it has a chance to develop into very good game.

Developers are very active I have spoken to them multiple times via e-mail, and twitter and almost every time I recived response within 24h.

About the game itself it is fun at it's current stage which is always important with early access products. It will require a lot of balancing to make it play better but already fun factor is there.

I like it that it's very intuitive and everything is kept on the same plane. I am greatful that developers didn't go into any crazy 3d spins of planets because it would be imposible to navige.

At a current stage route planer needs some work and ship purchuse mechanics too.

Over all I would rate i at 7/10 and will gladly see it become 9/10 over next few months.

Hello Nerds and Nerdettes, I have spend some time researching this game and here are my conclussions. Below there is everything yu need to know in a writen format but here is a video in case you prefer to spend 5 min watching instead of reading https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBCuq5WZdN4&index=1&list=PLCZleGQiTyuCDDxvRXJzAj5iaVjmTljS8

Game has been out for just over 2 years with first public build coming out on 19 of February 2015. And until now around 270,000 people bought the game with majority of the purchases happening in initial months. Currently there is about 7750 active players of the game and that number had risen from 4000 in September so we are seeing a bit of positive trend over last few months. Last but not least the game review scored has dropped dramatically from it’s original reception.

As always it is essential that people who buy early access understand that they buying an experience rather than fully developed product. It is implied that product will improve over the years but you must understand that the product may evolve in a ways you may dislike.

Okay with all the facts and this little introduction in mind let’s look at a potential reasons in review drop and what that means to you potential customer.

First the description of a game reads as: Medieval Engineers is a sandbox game about engineering, construction and the maintenance of architectural works and mechanical equipment using medieval technology. Players build castles; construct mechanical devices and underground mining. There is an entire planet to explore!

What a time to be alive! I have always been impressed by the technological miracles engineers achieved with simple technology like rotors, ropes and powers of nature. We can easily imagine that people who bought into the product are modded minecraft veterans, Nerds and Nerdettes that enjoy tweaking their build, constructing impossible machines with clever use of simple technology. Modern day wannabe engineers who like a challenge that medieval times bring.

Here however lies the problem with the game. For first year and a bit game lacked a lot of direction developers were jumping from one update to the other with what felt like absolute lack of road map. Game started to drift away from it’s original purpose of engineering and machine building and more towards building design and multiplayer. After a while they started adding survival element. Of course survival elements and multiplayer are essential to keep game like this alive and challenging but slowly very focused goal of making engineering game shifted into making more general survival experience. This left many people disappointed as it wasn’t initial promise of the game. I think this lack of direction was a major factor in increasing disappointment and slow death of playerbase.

Medieval Engineer subreddit has stagnated in subscriptions as you can see in here: http://redditmetrics.com/r/MedievalEngineers and now look at what happen in other early access games with more focused development like Software Inc http://redditmetrics.com/r/SoftwareInc for example or Kerbal Space Program http://redditmetrics.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram back when game was in early access or even Space Engineers http://redditmetrics.com/r/spaceengineers older sister game of Medieval Engineers. As you can see game struggles to attract new fans

I think major contributor to the state of a game is that team set themselves for a failure with weekly update schedule. Sometimes in game development you just have sit down and fix bunch of bugs, or code a major piece of work that will take small team few weeks to do. When you are pressured to release something new every week you end up focusing on minor additions rather than major patches. Even one of most recent updates is a door noise improvement. Is it nice that they tweaked it to be more natural? Sure. Is it important at this stage of development? Not so much.

Okay let’s now focus on positives since October time when Planet updates was released development feels much more focused and it gives out the impression that someone took a dev team together sat them down and decided on a game vision and has more consistent plan in achieving it. Still weekly updates disturb the flow hence door noise update etc. but it’s much better that it was prior to that. With the new focus we have seen increase in active players bringing back some of the old veterans of the game.

I am hoping that this focused direction will be consistent and will reignite the spark in the community and brings back more players, modders and content creators. From my brief chat with veterans of the game people who endured creation process of last 2 years it feel s it has been worthwhile experience and they feel game progressed

Okay so what is Medieval engineers really. It is Medieval survival game with focus on multiplayer and base building with some focus on machine building. If you want the game in a spirit of Life is Feudal you will have fun with Medieval Engineers. If you want a game about building new machines and engineering it gives you some aspects of it but not enough to buy on the merit of this alone.

Overall Medieval Engineers development is better than some of Early Access projects I have seen but game evolved a lot from it’s original form. Approach with caution or simply wait another year. As always with Early Access don’t buy the game on hopes on potential but it only if you like it in current format.

Nerds and Nerdettes my name is Feniks and I hope you had a great time watching today's Early Access Monitor and you are able to make better informed decision about the game. I am looking forward to your opinions in the comment section down below and hope for some good discussion. Have a nice day.

Winds of trade promisses many thing and I'm here to discuss how it delivers on those promises.

I will start by giving developer credit for being small 1 man studio and this being his first product. people learn over time and improve and everyone needs to start somwhere. From my few e-mail echanges he sounds like a decent bloke who cares about his game so that is always great start.

Now about the game itself let's look at brief description:

Winds Of Trade is a strategy game about running an ocean trading company in the 18th and 19th centuries. Building your trading empire will not be your only goal! Ruthless pirates, shady smugglers, wartime and fierce competitors will make the way to the top a long and hard road for you!

That sounds great but unfortunatly it's very misleading. Game happens in something that resembles 18th and 19th centuries but in ficional world there is absolutly zere historical content to the game and it falls very shallow and empty additinaly with few historical mistakes. As for Pirates, shady smuglers and firce competition you don't even feel that they are in a game. Every now and then random event of pirate attack will apear but it has no impact on a world a game.

Let's now discuss features of the game.

1. Procedurally generated worlds World composes of less than 20 cities and 4 made up contries They are proceduraly generated but are so tiny it makes you feel claustrophobic.

2. Realistic economic simulation - this is good part of a game trade feels nice, your actions influence supply and demand, there are producion chains in a game and guys who produce cloths will want to but cloth and dudes producing cloth will buy cotton etc. You can create small caravans following production chains and keep it very profitable. If you however overflowmarket with too much resource they may stop buying for a while.

3. Smuggling - is such a wasted oportunity it all comes to one single roll of a die you either smuggled it or not.

4. Smart Artificial Intelligence - there is non, there as well could be no companies around the world you can see some ships sailing around but they do absolutly nothing.

5. Dynamic world economy - I like the events I would like to see this area of game more expanded as it has great potetial to enhance the gamplay.

6. Contracts system - it is nice bonus to the game doing some missions for different nations and companies but again it feels a bit deteched from a whole game. I wish thay my doing contract of weapon delivery could spark a war or transport of goods bringing economic prosperity, conecting contracts to events would help a lot.

7. Turn based battle system - is there has move and shoot comand. so many great weapons in marine times and could be made into amazing minigame in itself. Another missed oportunity.

Finaly Controls O My God, they feel like someone who never played any game made them at random. Certain things became standard in industry like + and - accelerating times, "f" being search etc. Here controls are all over the place hyperlinks often don't work and you need to go to 3 different menues to find what you want rather than move with one click.

Other features like stock market, upgreades etc. are there but also feel very unpolished. game feels like a Early access Build not a completed product. Over all I feel like I could not spend more than 2 hours playing this game without getting bored. I hope developer takes critique into account and improves this game becuase utilizing all the potential that has been mised could bring amazing result.

I made a short 16 min video showing you majority of a features of the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp2SGZpwdxs&t=25s&index=1&list=PLCZleGQiTyuBsq-orc3Nclo_CkoMgeT8z

Many changes have happened since my original review and development picked up the pace where I am finally happy with it.

I had lots of fun playing Swordy and I belive game could have a lot potential as online multiplayer if it was every implemented.

Battles are short and very dymaic lasting from 2 to 8 minutes depending on your skill level and how oponents played. There is nice vaerity of weapons which I enjoyed and they all feel very different while equiped. II particulary loved the spear.

You can checked for yourself how game looks like in this short 15 min video of a gameplay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5fPlhNL-JA

Very fan little game to play. Dificulty is just right, graphics are cute and it place nicely. Also I always apriciate it when developers look for alternatives to rise revenue for thier other games rather than going down unfinished Early Access. Supporting this game is supporting Orkish Inn as well which is only great.

Skyshine bedlam is a game that is a mix set in apocalyptic word and features strategic battles.

Game is interesting in it's FTL-like approach and x-com type combat. With new patches I feel game is worth recommending and may give you hours of fun replaying different procedural generated scenarios.

I have completed my first run where I teach you how to play the game, different mechanics and give you a chance to decide for yourself if you like it enough to buy it. Check it out here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8sHGoH5UBU&index=1&list=PLCZleGQiTyuBUIr4ah5uS5e64Qx9eZTEz

Renowned Explorers is great game. I have played about 1.5 hour so far and enjoyed it a lot during this time. It is kept in nice lighthearted mood that will keep you smiling through most of a game. I enjoy tactical encounters a lot and the fact that i can resolve in different ways. It is no longer just a case of winning but winning in the way that will benefit our crew the most.

Game keeps it short and composes of 5 expedition to finish one run. It is similar to FTL in that manner that it can be completed in one afternoon and then you go on pick a new crew and start new procedurally generated adventure. I think game has potential to give hours of fun.

I also highly appreciate the tutorial in the game it teaches all the basics you need to know to complete first expedition.

My greatest concern is the price FTL legend that started it all is on sale for $ 9.99 and as much as I appreciate beautiful graphics of Renown explorers and more work put into the build I would prefer it to be slightly cheaper. For me it’s still worth it but it’s up to you to decide.

I also have a video featuring first procedurally generated expedition in which I show the gameplay, talk about mechanics, and teach you how to play feel free to check it out and let me know what you think. If you have any questions hit me up here or on my channel I’m happy to help.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSwvSjhTA2Y&list=PLCZleGQiTyuCuxTigfMgW_K2md93ufVtn&index=1