I was reading an article on Gamasutra the other day about the role of middleware and how having an engine liscence (or other middleware)Â simply cannot take the place of having a good team.
So then, what good is an engine liscence? Why bother if you are going to be hiring a whole team of artists and programmers anyway?
I can tell you some of the big whys and wherefores of why *we* on the Agiliste project are working with a prefab engine. There are a number of reasons, and for the past 10 years I have been pitching projects, I have always gone with a liscenced option.
1. Prototyping speed. Engines come with assets. These assets include code, 3d models, 2d textures, sound, fonts, all this stuff you have to create, at least in a rudimentary form, in order to have a functioning demo. Not having to create the lions share of this “dummy” material means you can bash together gameplay tests and iterations fairly quickly.
2. Bang for the buck. Let’s face it, while our project is publisher funded, we are still a half-past-indie studio and since this is our first big game, we don’t have a revenue stream or other sources of funding to draw on. Liscencing the engine gets us access to years of work we might have to do ourselves, plus a staff of dedicated support specialists AND a community of other indie studios all of whom are either immensely helpful, supportive, or jerks depending on whether or not the issue we’re trying to cover is listed in the FAQ.
3. Secondary marketing. We are liscencing the Unity3d Engine. Thus far, is has proven to be just what we needed, remarkably bug free and wonderful to work with. We may get the added bonus of having Unity put some plugs in on our behalf (particularly if we do a good job). It turns into a win-win on both sides, if you turn out a good product, you can plug the engine a bit and they in turn can plug you back.
It would be *really cool* to develop a custom, in-house engine, something we built from the ground up, but for now, for this project, at this point in our studio’s relatively short history, we need to stand on the shoulders of giants to get to where we want to be.
