It's refreshing to see someone advocate for small, custom tooling not from a "purist”"standpoint but because it's actually fun and practical for their workflow
Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
31–40 of 257 posts
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#32I believe a majority of prospective game developers got into it because of interest in game engine development. For such people, Unreal/Unity/Godot take all the fun out of game dev.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#33After having worked on my own (2D) game engine [1] for about 5 years now and having worked on related stuff for paid work I'd like to explain one thing that many people might not find so obvious. Engines are the easy part. The real meat & potatoes is all the tooling and content and asset pipelines around the engine. If you think about it, you need to implement: - importing data from various sources and formats, textu…
This.
When working on your own engine you also feel as if 90% of the time is spend on user interface creation if you actually want to have an visual editor.
People don't realize that they will spend 95% of the time on the engine and 5% on the game.
Which is ok if you don't want to make a commercial living out of it.
But unless you are making a game with extremely specific needs (eg Factorio) using your own engine will probably kill you commercially.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#34After having worked on my own (2D) game engine [1] for about 5 years now and having worked on related stuff for paid work I'd like to explain one thing that many people might not find so obvious. Engines are the easy part. The real meat & potatoes is all the tooling and content and asset pipelines around the engine. If you think about it, you need to implement: - importing data from various sources and formats, textu…
Yep, the tooling is where the real grind (and magic) happens
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#35After having worked on my own (2D) game engine [1] for about 5 years now and having worked on related stuff for paid work I'd like to explain one thing that many people might not find so obvious. Engines are the easy part. The real meat & potatoes is all the tooling and content and asset pipelines around the engine. If you think about it, you need to implement: - importing data from various sources and formats, textu…
This. When working on your own engine you also feel as if 90% of the time is spend on user interface creation if you actually want to have an visual editor. People don't realize that they will spend 95% of the time on the engine and 5% on the game. Which is ok if you don't want to make a commercial living out of it. But unless you are making a game with extremely specific needs (eg Factorio) using your own engine wil…
Even factorio started out on tried-and-tested libraries before moving away from them primarily because of optimization concerns (right?)
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think reaching for the delusion card without considering people's preferences, experiences, expertise and philosophy is completely disingenuous and shows that you don't look at game development holistically. Yes, existing engines do a lot of lifting, especially in 3D rendering and physics. But what about games that don't have physics? Or have completely different physics than you would expect? You mentioned assets…
Here's the thing: you try to counter someone arguing against a patently false statement about development speed with a bunch of preferences and what-abouts that do not necessarily make your stance true anyway - for instance if my game attempts to emulate 4D, my own engine STILL needs to do everything else too, we're not talking dev time for 4D in, say, Godot vs 4D in foo engine, we're talking 4D in Godot vs 4D and graphics and input and audio and physics and... in foo engine.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#37> 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…
> “boy, am I glad I didn't spend several weeks trying to code that up from scratch". 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'm in the same demographic (less successful than Noel, but I have made my living from game dev for the last 15 years, a lot if from my own indie games). I've used multiple engines throughout that time as they seem to have a lifespan before either tech or business reasons obsolete them (e.g. my first commercial release was made with Flash).
My only regret were the times I tried to roll my own, I would have saved a lot of time and effort focusing on picking the best tool for the job that saved me as much work as possible.
At the end I want to make games and not engines, and only do as much programming as I have to. All those person-millennia spent at epic/unity/etc actually spent doing a lot of stuff (even if you don't need 90% of it, 10% 1000s of people working for decades is still a lot).
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#38I believe a majority of prospective game developers got into it because of interest in game engine development. For such people, Unreal/Unity/Godot take all the fun out of game dev.
This is what happened to me a long time ago - I used to write software 3D engines, then 3D cards (3DFX in particular) happened. I remember losing interest at that time ( I eventually figured out that there was still work to do but still…)
Now that I’m quite a bit older, I have come to appreciate the game part a lot more - it’s maybe less techie, but it’s actually also why people make games. When I play with my kids then don’t see the tech - they see the game !
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#39After having worked on my own (2D) game engine [1] for about 5 years now and having worked on related stuff for paid work I'd like to explain one thing that many people might not find so obvious. Engines are the easy part. The real meat & potatoes is all the tooling and content and asset pipelines around the engine. If you think about it, you need to implement: - importing data from various sources and formats, textu…
I have recently done an engine rewrite for my sequel game and I very much agree with this. In my postmortem[1], I wrote:
> Most people think of a “game engine” as code that is shipped with the game executable. However, that’s only half of it. The other half, which I’d argue is more significant, is the code that is not shipped with the game - level editors, content pipelines, debugging/profiling tools, development workflows, etc.
Writing tools is arguably more boring and tedious compared to writing an engine, and that's where lots of "making a game with custom engine" type of project grinds to a halt
[1] https://ruoyusun.com/2025/04/18/game-sequel-lessons.html
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#40Many 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…
If your vision is weird or niche, building a toolset around that from day one can be way more efficient in the long run