Memige

Hey fledgling! A few of the past projects have had custom engines; however, Epic Tavern is being built in Unity 5. My general advice as the Lead Programmer here at Hyperkinetic is: If you can get away with not rolling your own engine, do so. Custom engines are a major drag on game development and can significantly increase the time it takes to launch your game. If you want to make games, make games, not engines. That said, if back-end tools and engine structure are your passion: Spend time researching code architecture and optimizations. If you want an engine that others are going to want to use, it will need to be stable, expandable, well documented, and easy to use. Engine building is no small undertaking and I'd recommend going into it with a dedication to developing it as a standalone product.

Sure :) It's actually pretty cool to run into a passionate engine guy. You're a rare breed and the few I know have all been awesome people.

Couple base things: be religious about system separation, don't let your network code get interconnected with your UI code... trust me, just don't >.> Maintaining single purpose structures will be important for expanding and retooling subsystems down the road. Also, find a couple people (either some indie devs or just friends) and offer to let them use your Engine as a Closed Beta. Little will help you identify areas where your engine needs expanding as well as a dev team trying to make something with it. You will need to write up a license agreement (may be best to have a lawyer do this). Also, don't underestimate the power of art and polish in an engine tool set. Remember, while you are making a tool that will be used to make other products, your customers will be the devs, and you'll still need to sell it to them. Also think about the different workflows from different fields. You'll need to keep in mind that many dev teams want a unified tool, meaning that not just programmers, but artists, music and SFX mixers, and maybe even producers will need to be able to use this engine.

Things that I like about Unity are how quickly you can get a basic product operational, that unified nature that I referred to earlier, the object oriented nature of the engine, and the asset store. Also, Unity has pretty solid documentation, and combined with the community answers board, it is generally very easy to get support or advice when you run into an issue in the engine.

I would add that Engine and TD positions tend to be high level roles that you will need to work your way toward rather than being hired directly into them. As you can imagine they are fairly critical roles, as they span all of the company's projects rather than just one. That said, if you can pull off a solid engine and have a few clients using it, that will go a long way to proving you know what you are doing. :)

So, I was curious: As Old guard developers, how do you make sure that you are staying in touch with the new generation of not only game enthusiast, but also the new generation of developers?

Open Disclosure: I work at Hyperkinetic, but am legitimately curious how my bosses plan on staying relevant :) #pleasedontfireme ^;