Hello all,
I wanted to stop by and share a bit of my progress on the demo for Dartmour — a first-person RPG inspired by Daggerfall and Gothic.
I originally began development in Unreal, but eventually decided to fully port the project into Godot. These are a few recent screenshots along with my latest devlog that covers where the project stands.
Of course, it’s still early in development.
Really like the art aesthetic. Great work!
That looks soo cool !!!
especially the night one!
Thank you. It seems I didn’t insert the YouTube link correctly. I’ll try again now, but with a different video. Not sure why it didn’t load the thumbnail.
O.M.G ! This is the one of the best looking game made in godot! Not only the visuals the gameplay also looks great!!!
Also the graphics feels nostalgic !
Thank you very much!
Technically, everything looks excellent. 
Questions:
Atm I’m solely focused on building a demo for Dartmour. If you are asking me for the full game, I have a lot of plans and vision (aka big open world like Daggerfall, so not a sandbox, but real-world distances etc.). However, for now, I’m grounded within the demo. The demo itself is not large and would be something like a starter “dungeon” of the full game. So from that perspective, and from the perspective of story and lore, all inhabitants of the village of Belstone disappeared, and that is for you – player – to find out what happened, because what happened in that village is an avalanche ball effect for further story in the full game.
As you understand, it would be better to just run through the demo (when it’s finished). It will not be large; treat it like a starter dungeon, and in essence it’s akin to one “level.” As a solo dev, I can do only so much, and I have to balance everything and be smart (hopefully) with this initial story and gameplay, so it feels and plays like an actual game, but has certain limitations as well.
If you are asking about the full game – for sure there will be horses. In this demo – no.
I settled on Godot for many small reasons (and a few big ones), like it’s lightweight and can have the modularity of Unity when making characters/scenes. For sure, it’s still rough around the edges. Ofc the most important reason is no guillotine hanging over my neck, like what happened with Unity, or how money gains (shareholders) are driving engine philosophy, like with UE5. I like that it can both use lightweight code like GDScript and also mix it well with C#. Integration of scripts is pretty good, like in Unity in that streamline term. UE5, even if you would like to do it all in code, you can’t – you have to mix it with bloated and unnecessarily complicated Blueprints.
Which brings me to the answer on why I switched. I felt that UE5 is a trap for me. Sure, it looks good and there are tons of good plugins (e.g., UltraDynamicSky), but it’s poorly optimized and basically made around Nanite, and if you don’t want to use it, tough luck. UE4 was better in that regard. Also, the smudginess of the output image really bothered me, with its use of TAA, smearing, and so on. If I turned off motion blur, all became really choppy-looking even with good framerates – don’t know why. UE5 is a trap for small-mid devs. It will give you a great picture and prototype iterations, but it will also make everything look generic because of the same renderer. So unless you know really well what you are doing and make a big effort in establishing your game’s style, it will just drive you into the generic-look lane.
Godot, on the other hand, due to forward renderer and Vulkan, is not looking photoreal out of the box, it’s just the way its renderer works, but it is better for making and applying your own style. You literally have to, because it’s a bare-boned engine, you need to add or build everything yourself that does not exist in the engine, no shortcuts. And since I’m no coder and using AI tools for assistance, Godot is much more streamlined in that regard, due to how script making works. The way I see it, open source is the future, and Blender proved that big time. And I’m saying this as a 20-year Maya user, I simply had to move to Blender, because it became better and because Autodesk practically destroyed Maya, like all their other tools. Money-grabbing does not work anymore.
Thank you for the detailed response! So you have a story —ё usually a weak point of these kinds of games.
Blender is often cited as a good example of freeware. But I think it’s more of an exception, unfortunately.
