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Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)

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Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)

#101

Post by scott_w »

pjc50 wrote: post #45
abcde666777 wrote: post #8

My experience with making your own engine vs using an off the shelf solution - the former can be viable and even superior on the condition that you know what you're doing . That is if you've built entire games or engines before, or have enough experience with the internals of one. Otherwise it can be a dangerous fool's errand on which many projects go to die. My younger naive self can attest to this, he loved trying…

> Consider that he produced the likes of the quake engines in only a couple of years. Reflect long and hard on the raw simplicity of a lot of that code Things like the famous fast inverse square root are short, but I would hesitate to describe it as simple. Ironically one of the things that the Quake engine relies on is clever culling. Like Doom, the level is stored in a pre-computed binary space partition tree so th…

> (if my memory is correct, oddly the engine uses quads rather than triangles)

I'm also working off a near 30-year-old memory but I recall quads not being unusual around this time. I remember a preview of Tomb Raider 3 in Official Playstation Magazine making a big deal out of the updated engine using triangles instead of quads to draw things. This was around 1998, so a couple of years after Quake came out.

Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)

#102

Post by zerr »

abcde666777 wrote: post #8

My experience with making your own engine vs using an off the shelf solution - the former can be viable and even superior on the condition that you know what you're doing . That is if you've built entire games or engines before, or have enough experience with the internals of one. Otherwise it can be a dangerous fool's errand on which many projects go to die. My younger naive self can attest to this, he loved trying…

I believe most of programmers who dive into game dev are actually interested in game engine and tools development.

Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)

#103

Post by flohofwoe »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #89
flohofwoe wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big difference is that the big game engines have to cover all sorts of genres and scenarios, which often results in bloated "jack of all trades master of none" code compared to engine-layer code that's highly specialized for exactly one, or few very similar games.

If building a custom commercial game engine these days... A team is 100% focused on the wrong problem, as the game-play content is what sells. Customers only care about game-engines when broken or cheating. Godot, Unreal, CryEngine, and even Unity... all solve edge-cases most don't even know they will encounter. Trying something custom usually means teams simply run out of resources before a game ships, and is unlike…

Many of those "edge cases" lurk in the platform abstraction layer (driver or OS bugs which needs to be worked around), and many of those problems are also taken care of in cross-platform wrappers like SDL (and for 2D games this is completely sufficient, you don't need UE5, Unity or Godot to render a couple thousand sprites and play music and audio effects).

But even more complex custom/inhouse engines are usually not written from scratch, those are often mostly glued together from specialized middleware libraries which solve the tricky problems (e.g. physics engines like Jolt, vegetation rendering like SpeedTree, audio engines and authoring tools like FMOD or WWise, LOD solutions like Simplygon, etc etc...)

Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)

#104

Post by raincole »

voidUpdate wrote: post #99
raincole wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that engines help a lot with? Like... multiplayer netcode. Rust (the top 10 most downloaded game ever on Steam) is built with Unity. However they ended up to write their own netcode anyway. Of course Unity isn't known for the best netcode, but how much an engine helps is often overstated. Genshin even bought Unity's source code to customize it.

Unity used to have a pretty good netcode implementation, but then they ripped it out in newer versions and still don't really have a good replacement for it

Unity used to have _____ but now they don't.

This is the mantra of the past decade of game dev.

Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)

#106

Post by intelVISA »

Madmallard wrote: post #82
grian42 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

multiplayer netcode isnt overly difficult to write unless you're at the highest lvl of complexity lol. it's not a black box, it's just transferring bytes around efficiently and keeping track of state, your "netcode" can literally just be bare tcp (+ssl), validation, and state, it's not that deep.

handling latency to keep a coherent experience in a real-time game is an unsolvable problem where every single mechanic requires a planned out scheme and companies go so far as buying data centers in optimized locations to help out with the illusion that's probably what you mean by highest level of complexity but even just a regular turn-based game there's a lot of questions you need to answer and decisions to make r…

Bytes + FSM, don't overcomplicate unless your salary depends on the solution.

Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)

#108

Post by bubblewand »

bandrami wrote: post #67
rhdunn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text editors/IDEs have simple autocomplete and the ability to do some expansion, e.g. a for loop with placeholders to fill in. Those work and are still useful. JetBrains also has local line-based LLM models for various languages. With the LLM-based autocomplete it a) generally autocompletes more code at once, and b) will often pick up on patterns in the existing code. E.g. if you have a similar method, list of print/…

That sure sounds like you're describing customizable snippets, which AFAIK every major editor supports?

Sitting here on the sidelines having never configured snippets or macros or any of that in any of my editors, which I could have done like 30 years ago but never bothered in all this time, doing quizzical-dog look at all these people thrilled about LLMs.

I guess they might finally get me to use those things since they take the “configuring” and “remembering shortcuts” part out, but so much of this doesn’t look new at all. Super old, actually.

Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)

#109

Post by threethirtytwo »

abcde666777 wrote: post #8

My experience with making your own engine vs using an off the shelf solution - the former can be viable and even superior on the condition that you know what you're doing . That is if you've built entire games or engines before, or have enough experience with the internals of one. Otherwise it can be a dangerous fool's errand on which many projects go to die. My younger naive self can attest to this, he loved trying…

AI may change the game here. Most games are slop coded by humans anyway as the industry prioritizes speed and dead lines over code quality.

So having AI build the slop instead of a human seems to make sense. I really wonder how AI is changing the gaming industry.

The articles author strangely left AI out of what he wrote. While I know a lot of HN readers are traditional and love the old way of doing things I don’t know how much longer that way will last.

Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)

#110

Post by Murfalo »

hjkl0 wrote: post #58
redbell wrote: post #6

> Our game, Celeste I was really enjoying reading this piece until I read the above, then I realized I am reading for a big developer, the maker of, Celeste [1]. I am definitely adding this to my list of favorite articles about making games. Also, you may want to check a previous discussion from nine months ago (573 points, 246 comments ): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44038209 _____________ 1. https://store.s…

But Celeste came out in 2018. How is it relevant to 2025 as suggested in the title? Also, pretty sure it was a small indie team rather than a “big developer”

In the article they make that 2025 is a tipping point where open source frameworks and libraries "just work", making speedy, fun development possible without needing to fight the clunkiness of heavyweight engines.

And any new stuff regarding Celeste or from their devs will forever be relevant to me! Highly recommend to any who haven't played it.

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