Skywanderers is created in Unity, which is quite a popular game engine. Games made with Unity include: Cities: Skylines, Firewatch, Kerbal Space Program, I Am Bread, Ori and the Blind Forest, Broforce... It's a great little engine and can be incredibly powerful in the right hands on the right project (ie KSP). A game engine basically makes game developers' jobs easier, by providing them with a lot of prebuilt tools to cut down development time, things such as rendering, physics, sound, animation, networking, scripting, AI...
Unity is particularly notable for its great rendering/graphics. Unity provides almost all (if not all) the fancy graphics (lighting, flares, particles etc) and LOD systems. Little to no work involved there. Unity also provides its own audio engine. Notice how my list of positives for Skywanderers mostly comprises of things that Unity handles? Notice how almost all Skywanderers videos focus on aesthetics
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Now, there's a sacrifice to pay for using Unity, and for many games, the sacrifice is well made, as the loss would have contributed little to no benefits. However, in Skywanderers case, this "shortcut" might be fatal. The issue with using Unity is that access to low-level code is limited/restricted. For a voxel game that wants to scale, that's a problem. Massive optimisations? Forget it. When you start hitting millions of blocks, hundreds of entities not just static, but dynamic too, you need serious optimisation work. Games like StarMade and Skywanderers need access to the low level, it's no small feat to achieve a massive living universe. I think if Skywanderers is aiming for the same scale as StarMade, Unity was a poor choice.
Which leads me to what I think are the biggest negatives for Skywanderers.
- Made in Unity, great for getting smaller to medium projects off the ground quickly, but the lack of access to the low level leaves little room for optimisation work necessary for a massive voxel space game with millions of blocks entities flying, colliding, fighting in 3D space.
- Won't scale effectively, for the reasons listed above in my talk about Unity, but also the design choices made. A heavy focus on aesthetics takes up a lot of resources. Unity graphics, while nice, don't really scale too well. With the plethora of non-block (smaller) objects able to be used, the performance impact doesn't allow for this sort of detail to be scaled. Again, if Skywanderers is aiming for the scale of StarMade, this was a poor design choice.
- No Physics implemented. This is a big one, most people won't realise how big of a thing this is. Physics is a lot of work. Not even collisions. If graphics in Skywanderers is 0.5-1% (using Unity) of work (which is quite generous), Physics is at least 25% of the total work required. Physics in a continuously changing voxel environment is a beast to deal with. This point alone is enough to see how much work they have to catch up.
- Planets are 3D placeholders. All the cool planets you see? Don't exist. They are merely 3D models, you can not go to them. This is not implemented at all. That's a lot of work to implement.
- No game mechanics are functional, power, shields, weapons... While there are turret systems and "weapons" they are all visual. Why do you think the scenes in the trailer either cut before weapon impact or are disguised by explosions?
- Lacking plenty of content already in StarMade, to name a few... NPCs, Fleets, Crafting, Trading
- Multiplayer appears to be minimal, lots of work still needs to be done here. This is another big point, multiplayer is hard to do. Although Unity likely handles a lot, I'm sure there's plenty of development time to be invested there.
So if it's missing all of this, what is Skywanderers now? It's a fancy looking (thanks to Unity) spaceship builder, literally. As in, that's all you can do, not as in that's the only fun part, it's the only part. The developer appears to have his priorities set wrong, focusing on aesthetics and marketing, when he should be working on the foundations for the game. It's nice eye candy for sure, and he's been able to appear to make plenty of progress thanks to a great game engine and games that have already attempted the content.
StarMade has made a lot of mistakes, but let me put it this way, if I had $1,000,000 I wanted to invest in a voxel space sandbox, I'd invest it in StarMade over Skywanderers any day. Pretty things are pretty, but I'd rather have my developers working on the foundations for the game, instead of prettying it up so early into development.
