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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

#181

Post by whstl »

dismalaf wrote: post #159
NotGMan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Visual editors are a waste of time. For 2D, lots of solutions exist (Tiled for example). For 3D, you can use Blender as your editor. The key to making no engine work is to make only what you actually need.

That’s a great idea.

I have limited experience scripting Blender, but there is a BPY API to add custom panels, so adding metadata to “entities” and simplifying the export workflow is probably feasible to the point it will be very close to an editor.

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

#182

Post by hbn »

msephton wrote: post #130

I 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.ycombinato…

Hey I recognize that game, great work!

I've had my Playdate for a couple years but it was only this past weekend I finally got inspired to start playing around with the SDK like I've been telling myself I would since I bought the thing.

I had never used Lua prior to now so that's also part of the learning experience. I'd really like some strong typing and some other language safety features, but it's good for what it needs to do. So far all I've made is a little tech demo of text that rotates around in fake 3D space in relation to the crank, like the iOS options picker. Clip here:

https://bsky.app/profile/haydenblai.se/post/3lpgnya4cqk2a

The other thing I learned from this project is I forgot more trigonometry skills than I thought in my years of CRUD/webapp development.

One of the best things about developing for Playdate is how freeing it is to have a fixed canvas that you're drawing to. I'm so used to having to make all my UIs responsive, I love being able to just position something at a pixel value and know it'll work on everyone's device.

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

#183

Post by Arwill »

jayd16 wrote: post #161
Arwill wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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...

The problem with GUI settings is that the result is not apparent, and there might be side effects. I do not find spending half day on trying out setting combinations as productive work.

I have looked into SRP and i do still consider that as an option, and also replacing the shaders. But i have doubts regarding the SRP, for example i have looked at the code that sorts lights in Forward+. The individual light calculations are not much, but its still done trough the job system. I imagine if there are hundreds of lights, then that would make sense, but for 2-5 lights, it seems like a waste. So it might be optimised to scale, but not for my case.

Is the effort of replacing the SRP worth it, and is the performance comparable to putting together/reusing an engine in C++? It is also a bigger commitment, as it needs to be coded on a different level and in a way very specific to the engine. Better than having to reverse asset file formats, but still very specific to the engine.

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

#184

Post by arminiusreturns »

iFire wrote: post #168
monkeyelite wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Using Godot for my big project, thank you for donating the IK stuff to godot!

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

#185

Post by dismalaf »

whstl wrote: post #181
dismalaf wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visual editors are a waste of time. For 2D, lots of solutions exist (Tiled for example). For 3D, you can use Blender as your editor. The key to making no engine work is to make only what you actually need.

That’s a great idea. I have limited experience scripting Blender, but there is a BPY API to add custom panels, so adding metadata to “entities” and simplifying the export workflow is probably feasible to the point it will be very close to an editor.

Even without scripting Blender, GLTF is a "scene" format. GLTF files hold information about models, textures, lights, etc... So you can create your scene then import straight into your game with GLTF (open source, super common).

And of course since Blender is used for movies, it does scenes well already.

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

#186

Post by hannofcart »

From the limited game dev experience I have/had, my recommendation is to introspect whether building the tech is just fun escapism from working on the really hard part of game dev: designing something that's really fun to play.

Building your own engine may "feel" like progress but it isn't. A fun game loop implemented with the most rudimentary frameworks, (or sometimes even pen and paper!) is more valuable than just a fancy custom engine implementation without a fun game mechanic.

Very often I find some friends of mine still in gamedev getting sidetracked by the intellectual stimulation that building tech gives them (because they are programmers) and burn out before they actually design/discover a fun game mechanic that they can actually ship a game with.

All this is ofcourse assuming you want to make money off your game. If you are just having fun with a hobby project or doing it to hone your programming skills, go nuts with the custom game engine code; more power to you!

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

#188

Post by cobalt »

agentultra wrote: post #116
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…

Keep in mind that when writing your own "engine," you don't need it to be as general as possible to handle every possible kind of game. You just need it to handle your game. And there are plenty of libraries and frameworks that can be pulled in to handle things like UI, compression, etc. The OP uses imGUI which is an excellent, small UI library for making in-game editors. When choosing to go down that path you're not…

This is really the case for all engines. Unity is a bit of of an outlier, though took a long time to get where it is.

Unreal Engine is really the Unreal Tournament/Gears of War engine at its core.

Good engines are those that are focused on what the game needs. YAGNI/KISS apply here too

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

#189

Post by 3036e4 »

OnionBlender wrote: post #153
varbhat wrote: post #79

Isn't that a huge effort? I remember few games which developed their own game engines from scratch (factorio, limbo, bg3). But, wouldn't it be easier and better to use game engines like godot?

I suppose it depends where you draw the line between engine and framework. Factorio used parts of Allegro until 2018. https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-230

Engine these days implies one of those IDEs with everything included (scene editor etc). I don't know how or why, but language drifted in the last 20 years or so.

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

#190

Post by Supermancho »

dismalaf wrote: post #159
NotGMan wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Visual editors are a waste of time. For 2D, lots of solutions exist (Tiled for example). For 3D, you can use Blender as your editor. The key to making no engine work is to make only what you actually need.

Visual editing is how all UI is designed. It's not a waste of time. Visual editing is the primary way to prototype, which means it's heavily used at the beginning and less as development goes forward. Projects have some process to translate the prototypes into scaffolding UI in the Editor, then modify with state where necessary. This pipeline is common across all types of software.
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