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Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)

noelberry.ca

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

#111

Post by herpdyderp »

doctorhandshake wrote: post #97
spiffyk wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest mistake you can make is shifting your mindset from making a game to making a game engine . No, you still want to be dead set on making your game , you just don't have the ready-made building blocks from an off-the-shelf engine, so you have to make your own as you go, and only as needed. Personally, when I was working on my little game, I found it helpful to call the endeavour—just like Noel Berry…

The way I phrase this to myself is ‘make the tool, don’t make the tool that makes the tool.’

On the contrary, making the tool that makes the tool is what I live for! My personal tech stack has benefited incredibly from this practice and fuels my startup, though it did take me 20 years of slow iteration to get here.

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

#112

Post by Froztnova »

rimmontrieu wrote: post #4

Nice article, engines are bloated and introduce so many overheads. If you don't intend to ship any AAA games, consider investing your times to learn code-first game frameworks like libGDX, MonoGame, love2d,... or even lower level stuffs like SDL, bgfx, opengl which are good enough for almost any cases. A bit higher learning curve is expected but it won't hide anything from you, or bury you under tons of bloated abstr…

I've been building some stuff with love2D for a while now, more a hobby than anything else, and I've really enjoyed the process. Nothing really crazy, just a 2D platformer.

I think that if I were making something in 3D or I were more serious I'd use an engine, but I've found that I get more satisfaction from building tools than from learning how to use tools that other people have built.

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

#113

Post by tmtvl »

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…

Better link to Itch (https://maddymakesgamesinc.itch.io/celeste>) than Steam, Itch by default only takes a 10% cut instead of 30%.

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

#114

Post by boca_honey »

RASBR89 wrote: post #94

A lot of modern games ‘feel’ the same to me now. Same sort of lighting, blur.. even the texture loading and pop in. They all sort of blend into one mess. I liked when games all felt very distinctly different and I feel like part of that was that they all varied on ‘engine’

That's the Unity / Unreal look. I can see why that might be a problem, but I actually really like the Unreal 4 look and think fondly about many games using that engine that I like. The way it handles lighting, fog effects and color in general makes me feel "I'm home".

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

#115

Post by Levitating »

simooooo wrote: post #36
rimmontrieu wrote: post #4

Nice article, engines are bloated and introduce so many overheads. If you don't intend to ship any AAA games, consider investing your times to learn code-first game frameworks like libGDX, MonoGame, love2d,... or even lower level stuffs like SDL, bgfx, opengl which are good enough for almost any cases. A bit higher learning curve is expected but it won't hide anything from you, or bury you under tons of bloated abstr…

Nobody seems to consider that doing it yourself, requires you implement it at least as efficiently as the commercial engine did, otherwise you're just creating a worse-performing implementation that seems to behave just like a bloated engine does.

That's not necessarily true, engines also create overhead. If you create your own engine, you can tailor it exactly to your use case.

Besides not all games need performance, I have been working on a clone of the original elite game using SDL. It gets 6000 fps easily.

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

#116

Post by hollowturtle »

To anyone with experience on the matter: I'm looking for making a mobile app which resembles more of a game or "a graphical app" and was looking into tech I could use, all I need is a drawing API I could use cross platform for Android and iOS without much hassle, don't need any OS specific widget/component, I just want to draw stuff on the screen, handle touch input and do some network calls. Possibly with a statically typed language that gets compiled and has good performance. So far I excluded React Native because it's javascript and has too many dependencies(especially with expo) and SDL3 with plain C which seemed a little too much low level to dealing with on a mobile phone. Also tried go mobile but seems unmaintained and gives opengl context which is deprecated on iOS, and finally I'd really liked using Raylib but no iOS support :(. Any suggestion?

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

#117

Post by Anonyneko »

roflcopter69 wrote: post #71

I see `dotnet watch` being mentioned for code hot reload which is such a great feature for quickly iterating on a game. Not having to restart the whole game just because one has changed a few if statements and values really helps staying in the flow. But I'm still not too enthusiastic about having GC in C# which is why ideally I'd like to start making a small 2D game just with SDL3 and C++ but how could I get this ni…

You could also offload potentially GC-heavy parts to C++ and write the rest in C#. Depends on the game, but usually most of the game logic that you'll be constantly tinkering with doesn't require all that much memory in the first place.

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

#118

Post by newswasboring »

hollowturtle wrote: post #116

To anyone with experience on the matter: I'm looking for making a mobile app which resembles more of a game or "a graphical app" and was looking into tech I could use, all I need is a drawing API I could use cross platform for Android and iOS without much hassle, don't need any OS specific widget/component, I just want to draw stuff on the screen, handle touch input and do some network calls. Possibly with a statical…

If you are willing to try out Lua there is Love[1]. Supports most common platforms on PC and mobile.

[1] https://love2d.org/

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

#119

Post by Zarathruster »

bob1029 wrote: post #5

The primary thing I'm going for in a commercial engine is platform targeting and stability. Some of the defaults are certainly "bland", but that ensures I can actually ship this thing to a meaningful % of the available market. Unity's coverage is so consistent that I've been debating using it for non gaming applications. There aren't many cross platform ecosystems that work this well.

Just a polite heads-up in case you weren't aware: for non-game usage of Unity, the licensing situation is... a little complicated. That goes for the engine as well as a lot of the stuff I've seen in the Asset Store. Just a thing to bear in mind, and potentially a reason to use a different engine.

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

#120

Post by rhdunn »

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?

Customizable snipping is a feature editors support (which I mentioned as they are related/similar to what the AI is doing), but is different to the AI autocomplete behaviour.

If I have a JSON structure, I can paste that into the file as a comment, e.g.:

    # {"foo": 1, "bar": "test", "baz"}
    @dataclass
    class FooBar:
        foo:
and the AI will/can autocomplete/generate that to:

    @dataclass
    class FooBar:
        foo: int
        bar: str
        baz: int
using the JSON example. Then if you type:

        def __str__(self):
the AI could then contextually generate, e.g.:

    return f'Foo(foo={self.foo}, bar={self.bar}, baz={self.baz})'
Or if you have a SQLAlchemy model:

    class Foo(Base):
        __tablename__ = 'foos'

    bar_id: Mapped[int | None] = mapped_column(ForeignKey('bars.id'), default=None)
typing `bar:` the AI can autocomplete:

    bar: Mapped[Optional['Bar']] = relationship()
picking up that you have a `Bar` class in the file. Especially if you have other similar id/object definitions in the file.
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