Temporary assets will do fine for playtesting. You could use simple geometry or just google images. As long as its functional people will give it a shot (as long as you are polite and humble anout it) 
This implies that you didn’t actually read what I wrote.
If you played a game that was supposed to be full of people and the ‘people’ were just solid rectangles, I could see that as really stretching the methodology.
If there was an interesting gameplay aspect involved, simple graphics would work perfectly well. If not, then having really detailed people objects wouldn’t matter, because they would just be a boring crowd in the gamespace.
That said, since you’re an engine developer, you will be expected to provide modern graphical capabilities to people who don’t want to be forced to make retro-style games in the name of ‘graphics over gameplay’. An engine that expects people to make the games the way the developer would make his instead of the user doing it his way would guarantee the project’s eventual death.
BDX is an engine for independent developers who have a certain level of intelligence/experience, and who therefore understand the need for focus, well defined scope, and the kind of priorities I already outlined.
In other words: An engine for those who are most likely to actually build interesting games in the future. Generally, such people are a minority, so the potential user base for BDX is very small, but if formed, it would probably push a significantly higher number of quality games to market.
There’s no real incentive for me to consider the needs of people who prioritize graphics, because those people are highly unlikely to actually make anything worthwhile, regardless of the technology at their disposal.
Here is my two cents to place…
*shrinks into corner and whispers"don’t kill me for the post…"
Ok personal I like graphics but I also like the game play/mechanics… If i had to chose one over the other it would be game play/mechanics… but there has to be a balance in all things… If an important part of the game was just a basic rectangle then i would be fine IF It got the idea through to me on what IT could represent… if it isn’t a big part of the game then im ok on crappy looking models but as long as it gets the main idea across may it be what ever… now just don’t slaughter me for saying this…
my favorite games in history were isometric top down rpgs,
2.5 D like chrono trigger or final fantasy 3, or
I love Final Fantasy tactics 1…
Goran has a target market that includes mobile right?
Is this an implied generalization that all game developers who want to have a good quality in the graphics (even though it may not be to UE4 standards) will not bother to also make interesting gameplay?
Game developers do not fall neatly into the two implied categories from what your posts implies (your engine targeting those in camp 1).
It’s not a case of graphics vs gameplay at all. The issue is whether to work on graphics before the gameplay is complete.
I recently posted some of the puzzles from my game in basic form. No textures, just primitive forms. I got a lot of useful feedback, enough so that the final version of each of the puzzles will be quite different from the playtesting version.
But what if I had waited until the textures and models were done before playtesting? It would have taken maybe another week or two to get them to a finished state, and all that time would have been wasted because of the changes I would then have made.
Or maybe I would have felt reluctant to make any changes because of not wanting to waste all my hard work and the result would have been substandard gameplay…
No.
Game developers do not fall neatly into the two implied categories from what your posts implies (your engine targeting those in camp 1).
My post doesn’t imply that.
Ace/Pqfts - another thing to note, not everyone posts updates, but most people don’t do a lot of consistant work either(in team projects at least).
I may come off as spammy, because I work every night.
People are willing to play games like tetris for hours, and that’s essentially a game composed of just basic primitives - If you have something that’s really fun to play, you don’t need anything more than simple primitives, with maybe a few static textures.
+1
I’ll never forget the first time I tried making a network game in Blender. My flatmates and I would spend many hours firing little cubes and large flat planes at each other. Nobody cared that it didn’t have many textures (or even proper models) yet, but it was fun.