Others Game Engine of the trade ?

[Smbt3D]

Hi,

thinking about making a game. Mostly free roaming with the usual 5-6 day/ night times and some locations with sub- locations.
If certain conditions are met, special events will take place and these events are influenced by other things, so I need a lot of flags too.
Art will be 3D render art and I'd love to make it similar to point and click adventures.
I do have programming experience (not python) and atm I think I'll use Renpy, but I'm interested in your opinions.

Tyrano Builder seems to be interesting, but nobody here likes it (slow, maybe even slower with complex games) ?
Of course RPG maker is an option, hot price at steam atm. (like some other game engines)
When I google point and click engine, there are also engines like Adventure Games Studio or Wintermute.

Any advice is appreciated.

 

[DreamBig Games]

I haven't used it, but I have looked at some tutorials for this and it seems like a good template.

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Otherwise, I have used UE4 to create Cyndy, a game similar with what you have in mind, from scratch but if you want to move a bit faster, this template might speed you up.

 

[Synx]

Isn't Renpy based on the Tyrano builder engine? But a much easier to use/streamlined version?

A point and click adventure doesn't sound something for Rpgmaker. It would most likely turn out as a walking simulator. Unless you got actual gameplay that makes sense in Rpgmaker (doesn't have to be battles, but it needs more then walk here and click this interactions), I wouldn't use that engine.

Renpy is fine for a point and click game. I'm pretty sure you can create objects you can click on to progress. And you can for sure create different flags to hide or show options.

 

[Droid Productions]

Tyranobuilder

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, (RenPy's

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the founding of the Tyranobuilder company by 7 years).

If you're happy with the limitations of a VN, RenPy is well supported, stable and has a lot of useful stuff out of the box. If you wanted to do things like characters walking / pathfinding around the world, etc.. it gets a little harder. Basically, any time you look at which engine to use (for anything) look at specialization vs functionality. A really specialized engine (say RenPy) will come with a lot of the functionality you need out of the box. You can use it for a sandbox VN game, or a linear VN game, but beyond that it'll start throwing out problems for you, because in specializing it, they also made conscious choices about what they would and wouldn't support.

A more generic engine like Unity doesn't do that, but in return it also doesn't provide as much of the functionality you need. If you're making a game similar to most VNs, Unity is probably more pain than it's worth; you'd need to build your own savegame system, your own conversation system, build a bunch of UIs, handle flags, etc. It's all *doable*, but it means you start by rewriting a lot of stuff that Renpy does well. Now, having said that, if you wanted things that RenPy didn't do well, say 3D functionality, or characters walking around the world using pathfinding, etc.. then building the components you need for Unity might be simpler than trying to build a pathfinding/navigation component for RenPy.

Hope that helps.