And now you can also just vibecode little games and start having fun right away, they are great for kids
https://rosebud.ai/p/800a3295-ea07-4c80-a4f1-10fd8db24088
Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
121–130 of 257 posts
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that the type of assets you need to design varies tremendously depending on the type of game you’re making. A 2D pixel-art platformer, a multiplayer FPS, a top-down strategy sim, and a puzzle game are all going to require completely different types of assets with unique design requirements. You’d need an all-singing-and-dancing tool that probably wouldn’t be as good at any one thing as the existing spe…
There's basically two paths: (1) Build a generic and extensible UI tool which at the core is a 3D scene viewer, object outliner and an asset browser (similar to how VSCode is such a tool for 'mostly text data' for 3D scenes). Implement anything else as engine specific plugins - Blender can be that tool, but it would be important to do a complete UI overhaul to get the modelling and animation features out of the way.…
I feel like path #1 would also run into the same problems as #2 as soon as there was any need for real-time editing of scenes.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#123And now you can also just vibecode little games and start having fun right away, they are great for kids https://rosebud.ai/p/800a3295-ea07-4c80-a4f1-10fd8db24088 https://openjam.ai/lonely_ant_702/v3nyt4if54 https://rosebud.ai https://openjam.ai/
Why should less thought be put into things made for children?
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#124For 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 do…
Exactly. If you want your game to look exactly like every other game on Google Play, complete with all the same, long, janky splash screens and rendering hitches and slightly screwy text rendering and random audio glitches, use Unity. All that might be acceptable for an adware befouled "idle RPG" style game on mobile (and they're all that kind of game these days). But it really galled me that people were using Unity…
There are games in many different genres, many different aesthetics, many different amounts of polish, and many diffrent levels of performance… all made with Unity. It’s true that they provide a bunch of baseline stuff so that low effort games look and feel similar, but it’s not that hard to end up with game made in Unity that feel unique.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#125Many 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…
> 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?
If you have enough game dev knowledge to make an engine...then it's seriously like a day to learn these things to begin to bang out a prototype.
They take a long time to master but if your goal is to work on the game its not in the same universe of turn around time.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#126And now you can also just vibecode little games and start having fun right away, they are great for kids https://rosebud.ai/p/800a3295-ea07-4c80-a4f1-10fd8db24088 https://openjam.ai/lonely_ant_702/v3nyt4if54 https://rosebud.ai https://openjam.ai/
Why should less thought be put into things made for children?
Why do you think vibecoding and learning together with kids is putting less thought?
However, kids don't care too much about thought. They care a lot more about attention and fun
With these tools you get to the fun part faster and can give them a lot more attention
You also get to co-create with them and they get to express their creativity seeing results in realtime
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#127After 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…
> using your own engine will probably kill you commercially.
No - spending a lot of time making tools you don’t need is the problem. You can write your own engine and leverage existing tools.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#128After 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…
> 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: I wonder if there'd be any value in someone making a FOSS engine-agnostic editor designed to be as easy and powerful to adapt to any other engine/framework/etc as possible.
Some of the other commenters have pointed this out. But this just doesn’t quite work.
I’ve been doing Game Dev for the better part of 15 years now which is almost all of my career. I’ve been almost solely focused on building Tools and almost always building Editor internals and the interactions with the engine/assets systems.
There’s just so so much nuance to how editing works. You also want to be as close to how the engine will render so there’s also the need to either embed or have an api on your game to edit content live. People need hot reloading, people need things to look and act correct.
Just rendering a model accurately can be a challenge. Don’t get me started on animations
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#129> 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…
> inverse kinematics and animation blending
Either this is a central feature of your game, and writing it is worth it. Or it’s a technical boondoggle, and you don’t need it.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#130I use Lua & Love2D to make games with a similar ethos. Being able to set my own constraints is fun, and that's what game dev is about for me. As soon as something stops being fun, I know I'm doing it wrong and there must be a better way.
My game YOYOZO is a tiny 39KB but made it to Ars Technica's "Best Games of 2023" list alongside heavyweights like Super Mario Wonder and Tears of the Kingdom! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38372936