Forums » Help » New to game dev - is impact good for my idea?

Hi there. I am a web developer with some years of experience but I am totally new to game development. I am getting into it because my kid is interested and I want to find an engine that can get us up and running quickly. I have been researching game engines for a good while and I've always liked Impact.

The problem I have is we got stuck on the idea of making some kind of "space sims" game where you can design spaceships, add people to them and micromanage stuff. I think it is a good design idea because we can build it incrementally but I am not sure if this can be done with Impact.

Most of the engines I have seen seem to be focused on action games and that's my impression with Impact. Maybe I should be looking somewhere else?

Thank you very much for your input!

The impactjs engine seems to be optimized to handle: creating maps using tiles then having a frame-based system with entities moving about and colliding with each other and the environment.

What you do when entities collide or bump into the environment is up to you.

A lump does not have to be a rock it can be a store merchant that rents you a rocket ship.

And you could remove "movement" and have timers and logic determine results.

What you get in the framework includes:
awesome loader
sound manager system
animations
multiple level maps with varying scroll speed
nice array of plugins
well-designed javascript with a few sweet extensions you might not otherwise think of.

The game you are talking about seems like it could be a fairly large project.

I would suggest that maybe you consider working with impactjs for a while. Get your feet wet, then either extend classes to behave the way you want or stumble upon a game engine designed more specifically for sims.

At this time I have three directions I'm going with html5 gaming.
1) Continuing very happily with impactjs games
2) WebGL 3D engine
3) Unnamed engine of my own.

I'm happy I started with impactjs. Between the framework, well-documented site, and the active help forums I got just the start I needed.