Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine) • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by abcde666777 » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC

samiv wrote: post #48

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…

"Also - study the code of the likes of Carmack. 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." Also says something about the accumulation of complexity. At that time Carmack (and his team) were able to create a state of the art engine in a few years. Now consider the task today, if you were to create a state of th…

An interesting thing is I think a lot of it's caused purely by the graphical fidelity. For instance an animated character back then was just a key framed polygon soup - compare that with the convincing humanoids games have now.

And yet often the actual gameplay code itself may only be 2x to 3x more complicated then the days of old.

I think of counterstrike for instance - it's still just guys shooting guns in a constrained arena.

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

#122

Post by arjonagelhout » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 2:48 PM UTC

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…

I personally use Skia, in combination with a very thin platform layer. I do use C++ so that might still be a bit too low level, but after having set up everything, the Skia API is really nice for just drawing some text / other primitives onto the screen.

React Native uses Skia under the hood as far as I recall.

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

#123

Post by Zarathruster » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 2:50 PM UTC

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

Interesting. I'm new to this and trying to get a grasp of the situation but there's a ton of noise.

What's wrong with Netcode for GameObjects, and what are the odds I'll regret going with it?

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

#124

Post by hollowturtle » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

newswasboring wrote: post #118

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/

I really like love2d and used prior but lua isn't compiled and network support is limited, although I see they now support https requests on the latest version

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

#125

Post by agentultra » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 2:51 PM UTC

I’m in the middle of making a game now in C with raylib. Super small in scope. No level editor or tooling needed.

It’s easy for me. I just know C and raylib’s API is small. I got cross platform compilation going in an afternoon.

I’ve worked through some things with Godot. There’s just so much to learn that it’d take me longer to learn Godot than to get running with C.

Feel much the same as the author.

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

#126

Post by hollowturtle » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 2:53 PM UTC

arjonagelhout wrote: post #122

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…

I personally use Skia, in combination with a very thin platform layer. I do use C++ so that might still be a bit too low level, but after having set up everything, the Skia API is really nice for just drawing some text / other primitives onto the screen. React Native uses Skia under the hood as far as I recall.

I'd love to use Skia. Any template/starter I can look for having both Skia and c++ compiling inside xcode/android studio?

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

#127

Post by ecshafer » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 2:55 PM UTC

agentultra wrote: post #125

I’m in the middle of making a game now in C with raylib. Super small in scope. No level editor or tooling needed. It’s easy for me. I just know C and raylib’s API is small. I got cross platform compilation going in an afternoon. I’ve worked through some things with Godot. There’s just so much to learn that it’d take me longer to learn Godot than to get running with C. Feel much the same as the author.

For me when there is a library or framework or "engine". You are often having to learn the specifics of how this thing works, and ALSO map your mind to the way it works. When you write things yourself you are only in your own mindset. So you can write your 90% self implementation in less time than learning this new mindset. Then you can build everything together without special ways of piping things together. Adding more frameworks or libraries is an exponential explosion in complexity, and more and more of your time is spent with glue code. When you write everything yourself, you are in one design space and things flow more naturally.

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

#128

Post by ecshafer » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 2:58 PM UTC

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”

I think Celeste was popular enough in the indie space to get "big developer". To put some words in OP's mouth, its not "Big Developer" as in a large studio. But "Big Developer" as in well known and acclaimed.

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

#129

Post by kleiba » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 3:06 PM UTC

andai wrote: post #75

socalgal2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see making a game engine as the illusion of progress on making a game. Making a game engine is fun and relatively easy. You have a check list of things to do. Each of them the solutions are relatively well known. so you do them and make tons of progress. You get a window open, then you get a triangle up, then you get a texture loaded, then you get some basic text for debugging, then you read the keyboard for input,…

Randy (funny gamedev guy from YouTube) said in a recent video that he realized he'd spent the last ten years making engines to avoid the creative terror of action making a game. I'm paraphrasing slightly, but that's what it came down to. "I thought if I made a really good engine, making a game would be the easy part!" I had similar thoughts when I was younger. Surely if I just upgrade my tools, the hard part will bec…

That's also why the Handmade Hero series took more than 600 episodes to eventually go nowhere.

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

#130

Post by voidUpdate » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 3:09 PM UTC

Zarathruster wrote: post #123

voidUpdate wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Interesting. I'm new to this and trying to get a grasp of the situation but there's a ton of noise. What's wrong with Netcode for GameObjects, and what are the odds I'll regret going with it?

I mean, I dont hate netcode for gameobjects, but generally I prefer to have the application just set up some sockets for me and I'll handle the rest myself, which you can do in NfG, but I've not used it too much. There was a really long gap between having working netcode stuff, and I wrote what I felt was a really nice layer over the top of the old LLAPI for a project I was going to work on, and then they immediately deprecated it.

Im sure NfG is fine