What are /r/tdl's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

My recommendation is for Project Zomboid.

It has all the mechanics we were looking for in TDL, but approached in a more wide scale way, (Its not first-person whatsoever, but at a third-person from REALLY far away). Its more of an RPG in its gameplay, but still has all of the same looting, fighting, and building aspects we all loved about TDL. And the maps are huge, because they're based on real towns in Kentucky.

There's also a huge modding community for it, so that helps with the overall content is you ever get bored of the base game while updates are coming out.

(Oh, and its also on Steam.)

Edit: There's also a free demo for anyone wondering if their computer could run it.

> First they used Ogre and invested months of development time into this engine...

While I do have a blog post coming, please keep in mind Ogre was just a rendering engine.

>I mean..the engine switch to Unity happened some time in the mid of 2013...UE4 was already available by then.

Unreal Engine 4 was not available at the time. UE4 was released at an affordable license price on March 2014.

> If the development continues at this rate, we'll have a finished game by 2025. And by the way - I had already raised similiar concerns when it came to switching to unity.

Sure, but you have to keep in mind tools do matter. If we're working with sloppy tools and things that aren't working after months of use (Mechanim, for one) then we simply can't just force it to magically work, especially with zero cooperation from Unity's support team on our issues, which do not coincide with their marketing focus.

Do I ask you to trust us? Not really, but it'd be awesome if you did.

Our priority is making the right decisions for the game, and this is definitely it. We're making some other large changes alongside this engine change to ensure the game is stable and works, and that we can achieve the scope we have planned.

There will be more info on this in the blog post, for sure.

Game development is a art form and no artist should have to compromise their vision when they can find a way to make it happen

That's a pretty idealist attitude, which is admirable. But the reality of game development is compromises must be made in order to ever ship a game. And that opinion, not to switch engines during production, comes from my years of professional experience and I'm certain that pretty much every serious game developer that you could ask would profess how bad of an idea it is to switch engines during the production phase (it's perfectly fine to switch engines during prototyping & even up to first playable).

But hey, thanks to Kickstarter & Prelease sales on steam these kind of choices are possible, it used to be that game devs had to complete a game before they could sell it.

Also Sandswept should already have team licenses, so it should cost them nothing to upgrade to Unity5: http://unity3d.com/unity/faq . But that's not even where the real cost is. The real cost is the time required to re-implement the entire game. Time which could be spent improving the game in Unity4, or a fraction of which could be spent porting up to Unity5.

7 Days to Die is right up there. Has both a prebuilt world called Navezgane and a precedurally generated random world, just have to choose the one you want to play. The in game crafting is pretty good and getting better. Base building can be a task, but it's a lot of fun.

When I first started playing, it looked like ass, but the foundation of a really good game was there, it was fun even with all the quirks. Now that the foundation is in and pretty solid, alpha is still going, but they're adding a lot of new things and discarding stuff that doesn't work. Right now, we're all rubbing our hands together waiting for A13 to come out.