Howdy Folks,
I figured I would take a moment to post here regarding my experience with Xenko and a game I published on Itch.io.
I originally found Xenko back in late 2017. I’ve been working with it as mostly a hobby–I’ve only been doing game dev since really around that time. I didn’t come from a background of game dev so this is actually my first “real” engine. I had little to no prior Unity experience. All this to say, I found Xenko incredibly hard to learn initially. This could be a product of merely being “new” and/or it could be that when I started there were no tutorials. There were times I wanted to drop the engine in a rage-fit being unable to solve a problem–but I pushed through to learn something new. After enough experience with Xenko (about 4 small games and 3 mini-projects) I’ve gained an appreciation for how open it feels. I feel like generally “I’m just programming” and can hit the ground running. Nuances with Game Studio have mostly faded. There are a couple items I stay away from though as they feel over complicated when it comes to wanting to develop games.
Here are my amateur opinions for what it’s worth:
- I find the rendering capabilities of the engine to be very nice.
- I find the particle system to be powerful and easy to manipulate.
- I find the material system to provide for everything I would need.
- I find the shader system to be challenging to use (cryptic), yet capable…
- I appreciate the services system, the content system and the scene system.
- I find the compositor to be extremely flexible, though over complicated.
- I find the engine architecture to be well laid out, though very “large” feeling.
- I find the integration with VS to be an absolute nuisance.
- I find the UI system to be burdensome and clunky to achieve the results I want.
- I find that there are barely “just enough” tools to help troubleshoot Xenko games.
- I find that doing tasks through Game Studio takes “just longer” than I want it to.
The game I developed was more primarily a study of network code. I learned so many things with this topic and Xenko that it’s all well worth it. I’m considering working on a “for profit” title with Xenko/Stride, but I’m a little hesitant as I’d want to publish to as many platforms as possible. Perhaps I need experience with other engines to compare and contrast.
Here is my game: