In my opinion, an engine is not what makes a game AAA.  It's the sheer amount and quality of assets and the gameplay-specific details.

16 hours ago, Tom Sloper said:

Anything is possible, given enough time and money. Likelihood is an entirely different thing from what is possible. 

 

In other words, "sure." With the right superstar experienced 5 people, yes - you can have an engine after 1.5 years. The trick is going to be to get the right 5 people.

Understood, you need very competent people on this to make it work, not junior programmers.

16 hours ago, Magogan said:

Knowing more about the game the OP wants to make would help estimating how long it would take to make such a game. And what is the budget?

The idea is to make a 3D linear or open world action RPG (no multiplayer). I don't want to compete with e.g. RDR2 or the Tombraider franchise from the start but want to have quality graphics together with a strong story driven experience. Once made and the studio has more experience, we can hopefully secure more funding (through revenue and/or investors) to make a bigger game.

Games that inspired me are e.g. Hellblade which had a budget under 10 million for developing and publishing but also Horizon Zero Dawn which had a budget of under 50 million. We would want to have a multi platform release, not limited to e.g. only PS5.

If we realistically look at our own budget, we have an initial budget of 2 million but this can potentially grow to around 10 million for the first 5 years (developing and publishing). This should be more than enough to make a working prototype which can be used as a pitch to get a publisher or another investor interested and secure more funding, potentially even managing with the given budget.

I know it's early stages and I require to hire senior personnel, my question is more for initial research what I'm looking at before hiring a specialist to help start this (focus is now to get the cartoon division fully operational in Q3).

7 hours ago, Hodgman said:

5 programmers can make a great AAA engine in a short time frame...

IF they've worked on AAA engines previously and have experience doing such things.

Thanks for posting, I know this will not work without senior staff hence I wrote it in my initial post as well. How viable it is to get them I will have to see.

2 hours ago, Nypyren said:

In my opinion, an engine is not what makes a game AAA.  It's the sheer amount and quality of assets and the gameplay-specific details.

Agreed, a strong story, interesting and smooth gameplay and quality art is what we are aiming for, due to budget restrictions we obviously cannot compete with e.g. Cyberpunk or Red Dead Redemption 2 for our first game.

16 hours ago, lawnjelly said:

• It isn't immediately clear from your post what your reasons are for wanting an in-house engine, you need to justify this in terms of the cost etc. You haven't stated for which platforms, whether it will support multiplayer etc.

 

From my research so far without consulting a specialist yet (this will of course be properly researched later but for now I only do preliminary research about options), most game companies seem to use their own engine because they need a more lean and game specific tools to make their game, also the 5% profit for e.g. UE4 will cost a lot of money in the long run. Regardless of using e.g. UE4 or Unity, a lot of programming has to be done anyways to write specific code for the game we want to make, hence my thought to maybe go straight for our own engine and my post to see how viable this is in the current market.

The engine we would be wanting is a multi-platform one without multiplayer.

16 hours ago, Vilem Otte said:

I have to disagree with one thing - and it is common among game devs (especially here on gamedev.net), that there aren't just AAA games and low budget pixel art games. You have plenty of games that are not AAA, albeit having huge technical quality and often even custom game engines. Such examples being: Risen, Witcher 3 or Kingdom Come: Deliverance (which used CryEngine). Some having larger teams (like Witcher), some smaller (KC:D or Risen - which had tiny team compared to AAA games).

Absolutely, and I certainly didn't mean to imply otherwise.

You can also reach out to Epic Games or Crytec or other companies for custom licensing. I've never done this, but I guess they might be willing to accept a one-time fee instead of the 5% (UE4) of your revenue (not profit) you would pay with the "free" license.

On 3/10/2019 at 6:19 PM, Irusan, son of Arusan said:

Most AAA titles are built using Unity or Unreal these days anyway

Depends what you think AAA is. The big studios of Ubisoft, EA and Bethesda use their own inhouse solutions instead of paying royalities to Unreal or even Unity.

@ Orange75 The most time consuming thing I came across the past years I'm writing engine code is technical research especially when diving down into console API so going for PS5/Switch if you don't know what to search for in their docs. Anyhing else is more or less well documented in several articles by for example Naughty Dog and their GDC Talk from 2015 about performance in their engine or several posts from Guerrilla Games about their GPU based landscape rendering in Horizon while another source for research is source code from Unreal Engine or Cry Engine

~3-5 people will develop A-class engine in ~1-3 years. But there is no tools and cool staff around that. You will code UI and AI by hand's in XML or JSON. And code Shaders in some in-house XML-like language. 

1-2 for Graphics, 1 for Physics/AI/Vehicle, 1-2 for all other.

But, Engine != Game.

It took me 20 years to make Esenthel Engine http://esenthel.com/ (now made free to use)

and I'm a highly dedicated and skilled programmer, working usually 10 hours per day, 7 days a week.

I highly recommend to don't make your own engine, but stick to some existing solution.

Starting to make your own game engine at this time, IMO it will die out eventually.

The amount of work is massive, and to make it bug-free, high-performance, rich with features, etc. the task is huge.

There are plenty of solutions out there, free and paid, better find something that is best suited for your needs.