Julia is not currently a suitable language for game development. There is no major game engine in it. I have accepted this fully. However, the reason I look into Julia for game development is not its current state, but its future potential. Currently, there are actually some gimmicks that Julia performs well.
but mostly it’s theoretical benefits like solving the two culture problem between game devs and game designers.
And the fact that there is no current engine in Julia doesn’t matter to me very much because I’d like a custom physics system with built in magic system and so on made to be easy to simulate as well as perhaps a custom light system which might even need a custom rendering system.
As for how a person as feeble as me can do such a thing, I don’t. But if some miracle happen that I have some good team and so on, then it might be in the realm of possibility.
So, what do I want to make? I want to make a game as immersive as Sword art online.
Let’s dive into the game design from the first principle.
To have a sword-art-online-like game, we need a simulated physics system as well as fine-grained controls over the characters.
Now, let’s analyze what these entail.
With a highly simulated physics system, the combination of unintended interactions grows exponentially. This means many glitches, imbalances, etc.
With fine-grained control, you need macros to be able to play the game.
Normally, game designers would stop here, because who is crazy enough to suggest a glitch-ridden, unbalanced, aimbot-based game?
However, I’m not an ordinary game dev. Here are some crazy ideas. They’re so crazy I could put them out here and probably nobody would care about it.
- Glitches are just unintended features. Keep them. No performance loss, mechanics change, or time loss of glitch mitigation. Only glitches that crash the game or do something similarly severe need to be patched.
- Imbalances aren’t necessarily bad. If the game is complex enough, no player would figure out the most overpowered strategy anyway. This would encourage innovation.
- Aimbots aren’t bad. Games simply weren’t designed around aimbots.
By thinking of these from the first principle, we can find a narrow path to make a sword-art-online-like game become a reality.
So, after all of these, it seems I must be crazy. Why would someone want to spend a lot of effort into creating such a broken game like that. Moreover, normal game design rules don’t work. Normal game designs want to balance complexity. We want maximum complexity that doesn’t overwhelm the player, and so on.
So, with all of these, would Julia even be a good tool for it? I know to pull off such a miracle, I would need to create an entirely new ecosystem. Current game ecosystems were simply never designed for such a crazy game.
And how could I pull off such a feat. I’m very weak after all. I don’t know. But if you don’t believe in miracles, they won’t come true.
So, is Julia a good language to continue? Or should I go find something else?
