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[eerr]

For anyone who switched engines, frameworks, languages midway, but still achieved success:


What was the project(s), and what did you switch between:


Why did you make the switch:


Did you accomplish what you were trying to do:


Could you have completed the project with what you started with:


How much time and effort did you leave behind:


If you wanted to reuse time and effort from a previous project, What was that project:


Stretch goals postmortem:


And do you have any regrets:

[sonder]

Cool thread idea~

What was the project(s), and what did you switch between:

A surreal art game I put out a couple years ago called The Lady.  Unity3D -> Proprietary Engine

Why did you make the switch:

Unity3D makes simple things a bit complicated.  The Component system creates many questions that need to be answered.  Was starting to think it would be actually quicker to do it all from scratch.

Did you accomplish what you were trying to do:

More or less.  Translating Spriter Pro's wonky and out of date psuedocode to Forth wasn't much fun and took a month out of our production schedule, so it turned out good not great.

Could you have completed the project with what you started with:

Yes, and it would have been multiplatform too, but I feel that it might have lacked a certain degree of hard-to-explain polish.  The little things.  I also wouldn't have learned so much about how game engines work.

How much time and effort did you leave behind:

Not sure what you mean here.  How much I saved?  Doesn't matter, the schedule was going to be the same either way.  Whatever we could do within that timeframe was the measuring stick.

If you wanted to reuse time and effort from a previous project, What was that project:

N/A

Stretch goals postmortem:

N/A

And do you have any regrets:

Nope.

[quantumpotato]

For anyone who switched engines, frameworks, languages midway, but still achieved success:


What was the project(s), and what did you switch between:

Quantum Pilot, a SHMUP where enemy clones copy how you kill them. Switched from objective-c + cocos2d to javascript

Why did you make the switch:

Touchscreen makes for bad game interface and bad neck posture. Plus I had written a bunch of extra crap in the game design and wanted a fresh start. I moved over to Javascript + Canvas drawing and found everything much easier to work with, both design wise (starting from a fresh code slate but with a clear idea of what I did and DIDN'T want to build from previous iterations).

Did you accomplish what you were trying to do:

Yes. The game is out www.quantumpilot.me, playable cross-platform with much better gamepad interface and smooth drawing. Additionally, it gave me the foundation for future real-time arcade games in Javascript.

Could you have completed the project with what you started with:

Technically yes, but my platform & technical learning would have been limited.

How much time and effort did you leave behind:

I don't think of this as time lost. The current version of Quantum Pilot is, I believe, the 6th time I've written it. Each iteration explored different design ideas and different technical architectures. The current version could not have been built without all previous work. So nothing was left behind, only learned from.

If you wanted to reuse time and effort from a previous project, What was that project:

I wrote a Twitch-Plays-Minesweeper bot that has some simple code for queuing commands from Twitch chat. That could be useful to re-use in the future instead of re-writing.

Stretch goals postmortem:

I'm not sure I understand your question here, but I tried to implement a replay system. Given the new codebase I though this would be straightforward, but it wasn't and I spent at 6-8 hours on this. Later I found a couple bugs that may have caused the issues and fixed those but haven't come back. Even if those 8 hours had been successful, there would have been additional work and it would have changed the design vision, so I'm happy not succeeding in this regard.

And do you have any regrets:

Overthinking the design.

Hope this helps.