Flythrough.Space VS lasercrabs

Here's what it looks like now (planet files):

My project was a 3d in-browser escape velocity clone (think Endless Sky.) It ended up with an impressive feature set, mediocre graphics, not nearly enough world, no real game loop, and no players: http://flythrough.space

My mistake was building it totally in secret for most of its life. I worked on it for years focusing on adding features that maybe nobody wanted without validating the product/market fit or generating any buzz. By the time I was "ready" someone had gained way more steam on their own EV remake, even getting the author of Override to endorse it, so the fact that I had a working prototype didn't really matter, the community that I thought would be receptive wasn't interested.

I learned that you need to build something worth playing first, including some kind of game loop, before you try to get people to play it. Turns out noodling around with a hacky prototype isn't something people find exciting even if the whole community is centered around noodling around with mods and hacking. People won't mod a game they don't love in the first place.

Since this project, I've committed to building smaller prototypes and validating concepts before I go all-in on building something polished and content rich, and thought I haven't shipped anything this big since, I have met my personal goals.

Full retrospective: http://blog.eamonnmr.com/2020/08/flythrough-space-retrospect...

The conclusion: http://blog.eamonnmr.com/2020/04/dont-remake-an-old-game/

Here's a real example from a project I worked on in my homebrew ECS framework and later implemented in Godot: a guided missile.

In the ECS project the notion of 'thing that can run into other things and do damage' so totally separate from the notion of 'thing that is driven around by AI.' So adding guidance to an existing projectile wasn't too much of a pain. In the Godot project I'm dealing with networking as well, so the division is between fire-and-forget projectiles (derived from Bullet) which know about hitting things and doing damage, and AI driven Ships with AI or player driven movement which needs to be synced over the Network. In that case I had to copypasta the AI driven movement code into a 'guided' class under Bullet. That said, for almost every other task, Godot's composition first model has been way easier to work with, especially because it lets you test elements in isolation. Here are the two projects if you'd like to compare the code:

Homebrew ECS framework on top of the babylonjs engine: https://github.com/EamonnMR/Flythrough.Space

Godot with networking:

My go-to example for collecting a set of libs together to make a game is Evan Todd's lasercrabs AKA DECEIVER. Check out the external folder on github: Assimp, Bullet, Recast, SDL, wwise, etc.

Not sure if Lemma by Evan Todd was commercially successful, but it's OpenSource. Also this project by him which had a different name earlier, but he cancelled the release.