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Making video games (without an engine) in 2025

noelberry.ca

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

#231

Post by johnnyanmac »

Agingcoder wrote: post #38
zerr wrote: post #32

I believe a majority of prospective game developers got into it because of interest in game engine development. For such people, Unreal/Unity/Godot take all the fun out of game dev.

This is what happened to me a long time ago - I used to write software 3D engines, then 3D cards (3DFX in particular) happened. I remember losing interest at that time ( I eventually figured out that there was still work to do but still…) Now that I’m quite a bit older, I have come to appreciate the game part a lot more - it’s maybe less techie, but it’s actually also why people make games. When I play with my kids t…

I'm constantly split on it. Especially since there's two considerations for me

1. In terms of industry, potential employers do want to see my tech. So there's benefit to showing that I don't need to rely on big tools to deliver features... Unless they are a dedicated Unity/Unreal shop and then they do want someone used to the engine. It's pretty hard to win here, especially with the industry as of now being a disaster to apply into.

2. But I also want to make my own games one day. As such I will eventually need to think as a generalist and focus on shipping. But all those skills may not be what actually pays the bills in the meantime.

I like both, but I also gotta eat and I realize that going straight towards my end goal isn't guaranteed to let me keep a roof over my head.

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

#232

Post by archagon »

Protostome wrote: post #62
cloogshicer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don’t know Berry’s game dev history, but Celeste designer Maddy Thorson has been making fantastic 2D platformers since, essentially, the very beginning of Western indie games. (Jumper 1 was released in 2004!)

In other words, I think Celeste required decades of preliminary work and industry presence to end up as good as it did. If you build it for a long-ass time, maybe they will eventually come!

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

#233

Post by filleduchaos »

BryanLegend wrote: post #212
hbn wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a failure, it was just never finished. And more because of personal matters than anything technical. I'm not sure why this is relevant.

Of course it was relevant. If they had a better game engine it would have been further along.

They didn't need "a better game engine" to create Celeste.

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

#234

Post by filleduchaos »

archagon wrote: post #224
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 a…

In fact, the article is by one of the devs of Celeste.

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

#235

Post by 59nadir »

jon-wood wrote: post #11
_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…

From a starting point of having dabbled in making 2D games in the past it took me a few days of working through tutorials and documentation for producing assets to be the bottleneck in building a game in Unreal. In Godot I was at the point of being able to make terrible games within a few hours. The amount of lifting that modern game engines do for you is phenomenal, and I think anyone claiming they can write an engi…

I can have an engine ready for you that allows you to render arbitrary 2D sprites, levels of them, etc. or whatever in a day. People gamejam more interesting and advanced stuff than you're talking about. The mechanics of just shoving together some 2D sprites is not some big undertaking even if you write your engine from scratch, it's making something actually fun and interesting from it that takes time and effort.

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

#236

Post by rienbdj »

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

I somewhat agree. Good game design requires a great idea, but more than that a lot of iteration. If you are working solo you need to hold the implementation and design in your head, which is incredibly difficult. Iteration is slow. You need someone to bounce ideas off of.

The best indie combo is a programmer plus a designer/artist in my opinion.

Alternatively, you can spend a very long time iterating solo. Most don’t have the runway for this.

This is also why big studios produce technically impressive games with mechanics seen thousands of times before. The production risk is much lower for “make spectacular assets” than for “come up with a novel game mechanic”.

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

#237

Post by maccard »

npinsker wrote: post #13
_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…

I am not familiar with Unreal, but Unity is much faster than programming from scratch, easily 10x or more. One obvious example is physics behavior, which you can add to your game in under a minute, but with your own engine you'd need a day or two to properly integrate an external library. All the internal state visualization that Noel's showing off here is already built in by default in Unity. It has nice tools to dr…

> I am not familiar with Unreal, but Unity is much faster than programming from scratch, easily 10x or more.

With the caveat that the editor for Unreal is massive and getting it running requires more resources than Unity, Unreal's Blueprint is a great way of writing gameplay logic. It's accessible to people who don't know C++ or C#, and is a really nice abstraction for async/event driven code. It's a really good place to start with IMO.

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

#238

Post by lIl-IIIl »

archagon wrote: post #224
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 a…

Agree with your sentiment.

But Spelunky was written in Game Maker Studio.

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

#239

Post by archagon »

lIl-IIIl wrote: post #238
archagon wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Agree with your sentiment. But Spelunky was written in Game Maker Studio.

The original Spelunky, but not HD. The devs talked about how they started out with the Braid engine and then just rolled their own.

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

#240

Post by LocalH »

Making a video game "without an engine" is basically another way to say "making your own game engine". Which is a fine thing to do, but you're "just" making a bespoke engine for one game (or series of games). Sometimes those engines get large enough to be used by others. That's why it's called "Unreal Engine", because it has heritage in the Unreal games.
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