make me a first person puzzle game
Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
241–250 of 257 posts
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#242make me a first person puzzle game
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#243make me a first person puzzle game
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#244After 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…
At the indie studio I used to work at, we had some folks with engine experience. So, we rolled our own 3D engine and asset pipeline from scratch. But, we didn't have the budget for an editor. Instead we set up the asset pipeline to hot-reload everything. Meshes, scenes, materials and animations from Maya. Textures from Photoshop. Audio as a pile of WAVs. Scripting in Lua. UI layout in XML. Changing the asset files wo…
The usage of Excel is so hilariously cursed I can't stop thinking about it. Its just raw memory address look ups with extra steps. How did you merge the Excel file? Did you actually have source control on this?
Ok maybe a sheet is fine for a state machine if you don't care about visualizing transitions... Why reference cells when you could have named functions in a source file that could actually parse the syntax? That file would be trivially merged. You want to be loose on types so I guess its fine but you could actually have type safety and linting all the other language features and tooling if you just used a file full of named globals.
The mind boggles
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#245Earlier 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.
> 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.
??? Blender has scripting but it's for artists... Like, artists make movies with it... Movies that have scenes with dozens of artists working on it...
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
??? Blender has scripting but it's for artists... Like, artists make movies with it... Movies that have scenes with dozens of artists working on it...
Yes, but most artists can't script. The scripting is for tech artists or programmers to build tools/pipelines on top of Blender.
The demands of a movie differ from a game which is why I'm a bit doubtful. But nothing is impossible to achieve with peope planning, so I'm not dismissing it.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#247I 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…
Congratulations man, great work.
Thanks so much, it's appreciated.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
??? Blender has scripting but it's for artists... Like, artists make movies with it... Movies that have scenes with dozens of artists working on it...
The people who are used to making models are probably not the same as are building levels.
At least when I last tried Blender the UI was a lot harder to use than something like Unreal or Unity editor.
I'd probably look at the Godot editor first.
But I do like the idea of trying to find an existing editor in the same domain and modifying that rather than building from scratch.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#249After 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…
At the indie studio I used to work at, we had some folks with engine experience. So, we rolled our own 3D engine and asset pipeline from scratch. But, we didn't have the budget for an editor. Instead we set up the asset pipeline to hot-reload everything. Meshes, scenes, materials and animations from Maya. Textures from Photoshop. Audio as a pile of WAVs. Scripting in Lua. UI layout in XML. Changing the asset files wo…
Have you tried Luau - Roblox's open source compiled Lua with Types? Someone made a debugger for it that plugs into Visual Studio Code.
https://github.com/luau-lang/luau/ https://github.com/sssooonnnggg/luau-debugger
I'm working on an engine based in C++, Luau, and OpenGL - started almost 2 months ago. I aim for it to me MIT license open source, but it's too early for sharing. When it is, I do plan to post a show HN with the Github link.
Re: Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
#250After 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:
The sum of all those parts IS the actual meat of the engine imho.
People mistakenly assume that rendering something and having a Dear ImGui frontend constitute an engine but it's only the tip of iceberg. Actual real world issues, productivity concerns, getting shit done is the meaningful work.