Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
noelberry.ca
Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
1–10 of 257 posts
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#2> I genuinely believe making games without a big "do everything" engine can be easier, more fun, and often less overhead. I am not making a "do everything" game and I do not need 90% of the features these engines provide.
At that point, of course, you don't need the engine. Having said that, every time I've really deep-dived into some particular feature of an engine - such as inverse kinematics and animation blending in Unreal - I've come away thinking "boy, am I glad I didn't spend several weeks trying to code that up from scratch".
There's definitely an argument to be made for minimalism and anti-bloat, but the reason engines are popular is that they really do some heavy lifting for you.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#3> I genuinely believe making games without a big "do everything" engine can be easier, more fun, and often less overhead. I am not making a "do everything" game and I do not need 90% of the features these engines provide. At that point, of course, you don't need the engine. Having said that, every time I've really deep-dived into some particular feature of an engine - such as inverse kinematics and animation blending…
animation blending isn't that bad. If you have a two poses represented as lists of quaternions and positions, all you have to do slerp between the quaternions and lerp between the positions.
FABRIK IK algo is a ~100 loc function.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#4> I genuinely believe making games without a big "do everything" engine can be easier, more fun, and often less overhead. I am not making a "do everything" game and I do not need 90% of the features these engines provide. At that point, of course, you don't need the engine. Having said that, every time I've really deep-dived into some particular feature of an engine - such as inverse kinematics and animation blending…
I was like this in the past. Making my first 3D game:
After weeks of implementing all input, object management, culling, model loading, math lib, gfx, normal mapping, SSAA,... I had 0% progress on my game.
However, for my fun hobby 2D projects, I still self roll without dependency in the web canvas. You could call the browser an engine though.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#5I really liked this post. I've recently been learning OpenGL and C++, and the libraries surrounding it, like ImGui, which I like using a lot !
But for my projects I think I'll keep using Godot. I really want to make a game, and not the tooling required to make a game. That said, I've dabbled in GDExtension, and if I really need to have something performant, I'll use that.
I've got huge amounts of respect for people doing it this way though. They have a level of control over their work that a Unity or even Godot developer cannot hope to have. It has, like any game dev approach, it's pros and cons
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#6It really feels like all the open-source projects are getting more and more capable. I recently went back to fedora linux on my desktop and the nvidia support is so much better on there than it was even a year or two ago. Hyprland is such a smooth wm that wasn't around even a few years ago. I've been using wgpu for cross-platform GPU rendering, but I've heard about SDL3's recent official release, and I really want to try out those GPU rendering capabilities. What a time to be alive.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#7One of my first bigger programming projects was a side-scroller in Processing. Processing.org was an amazing way to get into programming since you could draw onto the screen with minimal code.
So I essentially had to write my own physics, collisions, trigger functionality, ways of describing levels, enemies etc. The resulting game wasn't really fun, but I loved the process and the lessons learned.
Turns out writing your own game engine is a pretty good way of learning to understand existing ones.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#8> I genuinely believe making games without a big "do everything" engine can be easier, more fun, and often less overhead. I am not making a "do everything" game and I do not need 90% of the features these engines provide. At that point, of course, you don't need the engine. Having said that, every time I've really deep-dived into some particular feature of an engine - such as inverse kinematics and animation blending…
Also using an engine allows us to make progress on the project itself, rather than sinking major time into building infrastructure.
Reinventing the wheel isn't that fun for most people.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#9Many people often say that making an engine from scratch takes too long. But how long does it take to properly learn Unreal or Unity such that you can have an idea and turn it into a game without friction? Presumably, once your engine is finished, you are at that level of expertise instantly, which is a huge time saver. In my opinion, the more experienced of an engineer you are, the more the scales tip in the favor of rolling your own, from a time-spent perspective.
The more unique and niche your game is, the more true this is. Stumbling around Unreal's horrid UI for 3 months just to realize that the thing you want to do is barely even possible due to how general and off-the-shelf the engine is, is not a good experience. On the other hand, if you want to make a hyper-realistic, open-world RPG, then rolling your own is probably not a good idea.
I also believe that even if it's not always the most efficient thing to do, placing limitations on yourself by using a custom-made specialized engine makes the creativity really flow, and your game, even if not the most advanced, will be a lot more unique as a result of that.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#10Kudos to you! I'm writing a game (a little MMO) the same way, the technical and creative freedom is priceless.