Just to note that the author wrote this game, >3 million copies sold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celeste_(video_game)
Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
61–70 of 257 posts
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#62Since 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!
Not OP, but this is Noel Berry, one of the creators of Celeste, a very successful and incredible indie game.
Didn't know that ... silly me.
In any case, I think the question still relevant - is the secret just "if you build it, they will come?"
I suspect it isn't since the competition is fierce, there has to be something beyond making a good game
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> “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?
It's worth remembering when deciding on rolling out your own engine that this is a multi-layer trade-off as well, I have an anecdote on this. I have decided a couple years back that my setup will have a hand-rolled physics engine, specifically for the reasons you outlined - having complete understanding over what the code does, how it's structured and how it manages data - but after starting actually-not-so-arduous p…
There's levels to that though. For example it took me all of a week to write the 2D rigidbody physics system that runs this game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVmd2vmZrVA
But it's tightly scoped, there is only really one thing that needs to be dynamic, although it worked admirably with more. We wanted big impulses so could get away from questionable cases easily and could deal with crushing cases simply by exploding the ship.
Likewise the players on the ship running around and the players when they're jetpacking about are all different sub-sets of code implementing that specific behavior.
A lot of "make a game, not an engine" is working out what the minimal thing you need to build is rather than making everything extremely generalized.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
On the contrary, lots of people enjoy the reinventing the wheel part as a means of avoiding all the tricky creative choices and risk of actually shipping a completed game.
It does feel like for many people, it's a form of procrastination and escapism. I'm still working on the game, I just need to do this and this and this first.
Of course - sometimes you just need to learn how it works below, but if your goal is to ship, and you don't have a lot of time, then what I said strikes true to me.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
On the contrary, lots of people enjoy the reinventing the wheel part as a means of avoiding all the tricky creative choices and risk of actually shipping a completed game.
Me, too many times.
I think this is also true beyond games, e.g. for all the different UI libraries.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#66> 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.
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Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#67[dead]
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#68For anything I have ever tried to make, I always find myself fighting the engine. Whether it is Godot, Unity or Unreal.
They all feel like a ready made game that you add assets and mod. The problem for me is that I mostly don't want to make that game.
An analogy that comes to mind from the web dev world, it feels like the engines are like wordpress. Prebaked and ready to show content, but the moment your objective does not completely align with their preconfiguration you have to do a huge amount of hacking and workarounds.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#69I am always super curious to read such posts. They make me happy for no reason. I do not make games these days, but I love to read about excited and happy people explaining the process they love to do. At the same time I learn new perspectives to understand what is going on in the world of indie games. I keep this (not so) secret wish in the back of my head because I have to work for some money to support my family a…
It’s also refreshing to see what IMO is a very smart selection of technology, when you see so many other people following hype (I’m reminded of the rust gamedev post the other week). C#, SDL3, and some other nice libraries. The thing is, it’s not trivial to get to the point of having enough experience and judgement to know what to choose! When I start a new game I’m often paralised by the sheer volume of engines out…
My take away with the final statement of rolling it yourself if it sounds fun is to pick whatever technology that gets your pen on the paper so to speak.
If unity gets you making the thing or making the engine gets you making the thing, most important thing is motion.
You gotta avoid the paralysis and just pick the thing that seems feasible and start typing ;).
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#70So, does everything he said about C# sound about right? I have no real desire to use it, but I'm curious if his opinion was more or less accurate.
Not looking for a flame war, just knowledge