I was thinking about this some more last night, and going forward I’ll be curious about a couple of things:
a) Will developers be forthcoming about having based their project off Lyra? Not that it matters, but I’ll be interested to see if you’ll be able to tell that certain games are Lyra projects. If there are bones that’ll be impossible to hide.
Cause it sounds like with enough time and creativity, devs will really be able to make it their own. I’m referring to this quote, that comes right after they demo a level and how easy it was to modify it:
And I did that using procedural tools that are already included with Lyra. Now, of course, we’re not limited to that. We have the entire Epic Games ecosystem. We have the Marketplace. We have Quixel Bridge. There’s even ArtStation. You can use content from those, and really make Lyra look like anything you want it to be.
b) While what they showed was a 3rd person shooter, I’m very curious about how flexible the system is. Two of the three other modes they mentioned, Elimination and Control, both sound like they’re intended for shooters as well, and that makes me think maybe it’s not very flexible at all. But then they also say “And there’s even Exploder, which is like a top-down party game.” Which is obviously something else altogether.
So, yeah… People have been talking about the democratization of game making for a little bit now. The latest one-two punch that I’m aware of is Microsoft’s ID@Azure program and now this.
As someone who is constantly amazed at the games coming out of the indie scene, I think we’re in for some pretty cool stuff in the coming years.