I’ve been playing Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 on my gaming laptop a LOT as of recently and I can 100% confirm to you that if I remade that game (from 2006 mind you) in THE SAME EXACT WAY in Blender’s game engine, it would probably be laggy as hell on my laptop and would likely crash a LOT.

I’d say that SHOWMAN’S: The Awakening pushed the engine to its absolute limit, and I encountered a really scary issue of objects just disappearing because there was simply too many in the game. Thankfully I fixed this, but it really told me that I’d have a lot more problems if I tried to make a game in a bigger scale as I am planning to do.

The engine is very very rough around the edges and was never really a main focus, which is why it was later removed from Blender. Some people who’ve tried to play my games I’ve made with it encounter the absolute strangest bugs that don’t allow them to play which is incredibly frustrating to me.

I’ve tried other versions of Blender’s game engine that have been touched up some more by people, but each one seems to have their own issues that just bother me.

This engine is great for messing around but it is awful for making big serious projects with. Blender doesn’t even allow you to sell your games made in the game engine if I remember correctly.

I put a lot of effort into making fake shading and bloom effects for this game. 90% of shadows in the game are all transparent PNGs stuck to planes hovering very slightly over objects. This is something I wouldn’t even have to worry about in a modern engine.

The same goes for most of the text in the game. Those are also all transparent PNGs. The text that fades in and out are actually physical objects since I can’t animate the value of a transparent image’s visibility. In MOST game engines people do NOT have to do this at all.

And do not get me started on how you’re supposed to set up an enemy character that walks around, avoids obstacles, hears sound, and can’t see the player if they duck down behind a short wall. That, is an absolute abomination filled with the stupidest workarounds I have ever tried to understand.

I don’t care if my next games don’t look like they were made in Blender’s game engine. I just want more control with what I make and also for the stupid thing to actually work right. I also do want to make things that are a better quality than what I’ve been stuck with for years anyway. I’m still going to try moving to Unreal Engine 4, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to be mindless and not care about optimization. I might not get it right at first but that’s just part of the learning process.

Some engines are more optimized than others yes but GOOD LORD is it exhausting when you’re just trying to start out with one you’re comfortable with and there’s someone screaming in your ear about how bad it is, when in reality there’s been HUNDREDS of games made in it that run just fine on PCs designed for, y’know, playing video games. Goodness gratuitous.