Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Making video games (without an engine) in 2025

noelberry.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 257 posts

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

#221

Post by johnnyanmac »

glouwbug wrote: post #162
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

Impossible but necessary. It's the big difference between an engine programmer and an indie dev. The latter needs to wear multiple hats to get something out while the former can specialize and work within a team of other specialists.

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

#222

Post by [deleted] »

bitwize wrote: post #219

If you're serious about making video games, you should probably be using a commercial engine. Period. No exceptions. Unless you're EA or Microsoft, you're just not going to develop a custom engine that can compete with Unity and Unreal. You may be able to write a good basic rendering pipeline and event loop, but the major engines have enormous ecosystems of tooling and talent, ready to go, and they're available acros…

[deleted]

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

#223

Post by johnnyanmac »

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.

> For 3D, you can use Blender as your editor.

Really depends on the team size, composition, and game. If you have designers on the team who aren't dedicated programmers, I don't think blender will cut it for them.

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

#224

Post by archagon »

bitwize wrote: post #219

If you're serious about making video games, you should probably be using a commercial engine. Period. No exceptions. Unless you're EA or Microsoft, you're just not going to develop a custom engine that can compete with Unity and Unreal. You may be able to write a good basic rendering pipeline and event loop, but the major engines have enormous ecosystems of tooling and talent, ready to go, and they're available acros…

Just off the top of my head, Celeste, Super Meat Boy, Fez, Spelunky, Dead Cells, Braid, and The Witness all use custom engines and are widely considered some of the best indie games of all time. Moreover, I think much of their charm and uniqueness stem directly from the amount of custom engine work involved. Writing your own engine lets you focus on the details that make your game stand out in a crowded field.

Your assertion seems silly.

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

#225

Post by johnnyanmac »

nkrisc wrote: post #77
xandrius wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, people forget one of the core notions of development which is not to prematurely optimise stuff. Especially something as complex as a game. Keep it super simple. Or that game will never come out.

Just the other day on reddit I saw someone asking about efficiently removing an item from an array for the game they’re working on. It became this whole CS debate and then someone asked how big the array is and how often do you remove items. The OP responded that it’s just a list of levels in their game, so not more than 20 items or so and is modified once every 5-10 minutes… So a day on their game wasted over effici…

Really highlights the divide between industry and acedemia.

Reminds me of when another subreddit was mocking some legacy code (I think Motorola? Some mobile device stuff) for using bubble sort. Meanwhile, the sort probably wasnt on more than a fee hundred items and the mobile embedded is constrained for space. Bubble sort is easy to read, write and has O(1) space. Performance isn't a concern at the scale being worked at. We're talking maybe microseconds of difference.

It's not necessarily a bad thing that acedemia focuses on theory. But we keep using school to put a square peg into a round hole and wonder why students are so unprepared for actual production.

It's ultimately the company's fault. If you want certain skills, you need to train for it. Your processes aren't public, so you can't just expect candidates to magically know what matters to their role.

----

now acedemically: the answer is to swap an item to the end and reduce the buffer size. I don't think that's taught in acedemia either, but that's a trick you learn on the job. When and if you do need it.

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

#226

Post by lukan »

Narishma wrote: post #206
lukan wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is still a lot of work. And every external libary you do pull in, to ease some of the workload, is just waiting to go abandonend next year. So instead of focusing on release by that time, you will now focus on reinplementing that needed functionality that just stopped working.

> So instead of focusing on release by that time, you will now focus on reinplementing that needed functionality that just stopped working. That makes no sense. A library being abandoned doesn't mean it suddenly stops working.

I wish that would be the case, but on the web stack, it happened more than once to me.

The web evolves. Lots of features get deprecated all the time and sometimes removed or change behavior in a significant way.

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

#227

Post by jbjbjbjb »

VikingCoder wrote: post #149
jbjbjbjb wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make your own packages for your extensions and pull that packages into your projects that need to reference those extensions.

And set up my own nuget repo? I want my code to be private...?

Yes you would set up your own nuget feed and publish as part of your build. You can set up the nuget feed on your own machine, use something like Teamcity or GitHub packages.

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

#228

Post by archagon »

noduerme wrote: post #53

I really miss the days of Flash when I could write lots of mini-engines as needed (e.g. platformers or side scrollers or 2.5D, multiplayer, chat ... all hand coded but reusable) and rely on being able to mix lots of different pipelines for vector art, bitmaps, 3D, audio and UI. There's nothing like that now. I tried to reinvent a few wheels. But at this point... a fairly low level (for script) rendering library like…

Games are “dead” in the same way that music is “dead.”

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

#229

Post by johnnyanmac »

nico wrote: post #140
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…

Vibecoding is probably going to take this whole industry by storm Already the biggest market is small games on tablets/phones Now making those games is becoming exponentially faster and easier Roblox, allowing people to quickly create their own games, was already a huge hit. Now that experience is getting supercharged with AI

Until AI can actually generate proper topology for meshes, I'm negatively worried about any Vibe coders flooding the market anymore than the market already is. The code is the least valuable part of a game in the eyes of a consumer.

And topology isn't even the hard part of asset production. Animating is the next big hurdle after that.

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

#230

Post by johnnyanmac »

some-guy wrote: post #201
Sander_Marechal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point using any engine instead of unity is better. Unity has demonstrated time and again that they cannot be trusted and that you cannot build a game (or business) around them.

Do you have any developer retrospectives around this? Plenty of my favorite games ever made were made with Unity, I wouldn't call those games failures by any means (Cities: Skylines, Overcooked are immediate examples)

The tech is fine, it's more that the last few years has shown some instability over retroactive license changes, questionable acquisitions, and general sentiments over years of seemingly abandoned support in key subsystems.

Disclosure: I used to work at Unity.

Post reply on HN