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Making video games (without an engine) in 2025

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Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025

#161

Post by jayd16 »

Arwill wrote: post #58
_m6gi wrote: post #9

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…

>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 would say its the exact opposite to that. For that genre, its best to roll your own engine, or pick something open-source. The list of problems that i firsthand experienced: There are lots of features and options in the engines, but they are not all usable at the same time. One feature disab…

I think you'd probably want a different render layer with different post effect settings so your weapons can have post-processing as well. I think you can do this in the editor with gui configs instead of changing code.

I'm pretty sure all of SRP is in C# and is "open source" as in source available and editable.

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/tree/master/P...

Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025

#162

Post by glouwbug »

samiv wrote: post #18

After 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 engine is the fun part. Assets and game design are near impossible as a solo dev

Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025

#163

Post by yua_mikami »

nico wrote: post #152
raincole wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Such a hostile comment. Just trying to open up the conversation. No need for snark or aggressive name calling The article is about creating video games without an engine, and the top comment is about what is hard about making video games My comment is about how all of that is changing right now and how the public is reacting to it

Nah he's right, people are fed up of hearing about AI all the time, it's off topic here.

Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025

#164

Post by iFire »

nico wrote: post #152
raincole wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Such a hostile comment. Just trying to open up the conversation. No need for snark or aggressive name calling The article is about creating video games without an engine, and the top comment is about what is hard about making video games My comment is about how all of that is changing right now and how the public is reacting to it

Even if you vibe code a game engine your best llm will need to do the work of world class technical team of like 12 people, you’ll need to get 10-20 teams to be able to find that dataset. Each run costing a few million usd.

Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025

#165

Post by Lichtso »

jebarker wrote: post #158
Lichtso wrote: post #156

Made me realize that most of the games I really enjoyed have their own custom engines (made for a single game or franchise): Starbound, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Factorio, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Empire Earth, The Sims, Project Zomboid ... Only exception might be Portal, but even that is using an in-house solution mostly for developed for one franchise. Like with most things: If you are new and have to learn everythin…

Just to clarify, are you saying that if you've never shipped any games then you should start with an established engine and only go artisanal once you have that experience?

Yes, pretty much. I don't say the custom engine first path can't work, heck I did ship my own games on custom engines first myself, but it is probably not the path of least resistance.

Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025

#166

Post by dismalaf »

Lichtso wrote: post #156

Made me realize that most of the games I really enjoyed have their own custom engines (made for a single game or franchise): Starbound, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Factorio, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Empire Earth, The Sims, Project Zomboid ... Only exception might be Portal, but even that is using an in-house solution mostly for developed for one franchise. Like with most things: If you are new and have to learn everythin…

This... I don't think I've ever truly enjoyed a Unity game. Maybe KSP, but it runs like shit and isn't a good advertisement for that engine. Even Unreal Engine: I've only enjoyed Unreal itself.

Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025

#167

Post by iFire »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #137
throwawayffffas wrote: post #68

For 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…

What adds oil to the flame is a bunch of "game templates" that you can buy and make your own game just by replacing the title screen and some models. E.g. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/templates/systems/stor... And if you open Steam games and go to the newest, you see that nearly half of the releases is some version of a generic Unity/Unreal template game in a slightly altered "skin": https://store.steampower…

Ha, if I remember correctly the squad military sim was a reskinned first person demo from epic games.

Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025

#168

Post by iFire »

monkeyelite wrote: post #129
danielbarla wrote: post #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…

> 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.

Heh, I contribute to a FOSS social vr project called https://github.com/v-sekai and the majority of the multi year effort was asset pipeline, ik and animation blending. Yes we donated the code to Godot Engine but we choose working on the tooling problem rather than the game… The V-Sekai game is in limbo / not a game. We made godot-vrm which does 3d avatars, with basic animations, look at, jiggle and copy constraints. Since we’re unable to use the unity ecosystem’s finalik or unreal engine’s control rig we have to code to the same level of professional quality with no budget. Features like stable multi-joint y-branching rotation and position constraints are hard. Feel free to chat in V-Sekai discord. I’m iFire.

Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025

#169

Post by nico »

iFire wrote: post #164
nico wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a hostile comment. Just trying to open up the conversation. No need for snark or aggressive name calling The article is about creating video games without an engine, and the top comment is about what is hard about making video games My comment is about how all of that is changing right now and how the public is reacting to it

Even if you vibe code a game engine your best llm will need to do the work of world class technical team of like 12 people, you’ll need to get 10-20 teams to be able to find that dataset. Each run costing a few million usd.

Not sure what that use case is. Why would you need all of that? As an individual, if you are just trying to build a basic game with your kids you don't need to build a whole engine nor a world class technical team or a huge dataset

You can either use chatgpt or something more basic like openjam.ai or something specialized like rosebud.ai

Maybe the people at rosebud.ai have been doing what you are suggesting to build their platform

Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025

#170

Post by iFire »

VikingCoder wrote: post #141

Please help me figure out the best way to share code between Github repositories... I love C#, and I acknowledge Github as the king of source control. I make a new Repository a couple times a week, and use Visual Studio Code to clone it, and open a terminal and "dotnet new gitignore" and then use dotnet to make new projects all over the place... On multiple machines, even. On a VM on my NAS. On my Windows machine. On…

I use git subrepo to make a monorepo.
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