Hear me out:
A game where you play a gnome wizard commanding a massive iron golem that you can clamber over for safety, repairs, or to reach high places.
While we're on the topic of "impossible to build videogame styles"... I've always thought 1970s gouache watercolor concept paintings would look amazing in motion.
(midjourney)
#UnrealEngine5.6 has a "Locomotor" plugin which provides a new #ControlRig node for procedural locomotion.
It takes a target position as input, and outputs an array of feet transforms which animate over time to step towards the goal location. Pelvis motion is also generated.
This is procedural animation in #UnrealEngine 5.7, using a Control Rig running a Locomotor to generate footsteps, and the new Control Rig physics to drive the pose to the target step locations.
This assumes centrism is most closely aligned with reality. Which may or may not be the case.
I say, stick to optimizing for truth and let the politics fall where they may.
You should follow Industria 2 because... look at it.
But also:
This is your daily reminder that non-linear step frequency and movement speed is a huge underrated boost to animation fidelity.
Real creatures don't smoothly glide around like an Unreal capsule; they lurch, bump
Games need extremely precise control over the world model. I continue to believe we're headed towards a hybrid engine with traditionally simulated game state bolted to an AI rendering engine that will handle cosmetic VFX like footprints in the sand, cloth wrinkles etc.
A custom engine is a luxury.
I've released two indie games on Steam. One using a custom C++ engine, the second on Unity. Engine development became too costly and distracting to maintain.