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If it's the latter, I'd love to hear your perspective on how to build a successful indie game-development business!
> 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…
This is a single bullet point on modern engines feature list.
Many 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 o…
I love LibGDX for personal projects but for serious development where deadlines matter having stuff like dialog trees, UI, etc. that just work out of the box and have the edge cases polished is Very Nice.
And ofc, cross platform with consoles is way harder rolling your own and that's often a big deal.
That sorta thing is why Slay the Spire switched to Unity/Godot for the sequel
Since you've been making games for 20 years, I'm guessing you're at least in your thirties. Just curious - do you develop games purely as a hobby, or are you able to make a living from it? If it's the latter, I'd love to hear your perspective on how to build a successful indie game-development business!
> 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…
If your goal is several decades of a career as an independent developer (like OP), what is an investment of a few weeks for a) understanding a topic deeply and b) having source code that you deeply understand, 100% own, and can reuse across future projects?
> 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…
My graduation thesis was porting a particles visualization engine from NeXTSTEP/Objective-C into Windows 95/Visual C++, based on OpenGL, with samples like marching cubes. This is a single bullet point on modern engines feature list.
Many 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 o…
From a starting point of having dabbled in making 2D games in the past it took me a few days of working through tutorials and documentation for producing assets to be the bottleneck in building a game in Unreal. In Godot I was at the point of being able to make terrible games within a few hours. The amount of lifting that modern game engines do for you is phenomenal, and I think anyone claiming they can write an engi…
For a more concrete argument. You also said learning Unreal using tutorials took a few days, which is certainly not possible, unless we are talking only about a very basic understanding. In the same vein, it also takes a few days to make a very basic engine built on top of OpenGL.