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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

#141

Post by VikingCoder »

Please help me figure out the best way to share code between Github repositories...

I love C#, and I acknowledge Github as the king of source control.

I make a new Repository a couple times a week, and use Visual Studio Code to clone it, and open a terminal and "dotnet new gitignore" and then use dotnet to make new projects all over the place...

On multiple machines, even. On a VM on my NAS. On my Windows machine. On my Windows laptop. On a VPS.

And I'm happy.

But how in the holy hell am I supposed to share code from one repository to another?

I want to make VikingCoderLib as a C# library (classlib), and drop in all of my favorite Extensions for generics and strings, and etc.

And then make another classlib for some of my Protocol Buffer utilities. And another classlib for setting up a terminal.js console for an app. And...

What's the best way to do that?

Submodules?

They really seem to suck. I can't easily make changes here, and use them there, without it being a huge pain in the rear.

Am I doing this wrong? Am I missing something?

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

#142

Post by wsc981 »

VikingCoder wrote: post #141

Please help me figure out the best way to share code between Github repositories... I love C#, and I acknowledge Github as the king of source control. I make a new Repository a couple times a week, and use Visual Studio Code to clone it, and open a terminal and "dotnet new gitignore" and then use dotnet to make new projects all over the place... On multiple machines, even. On a VM on my NAS. On my Windows machine. On…

I don't mind submodules much. I mean when I first used them I thought it was sucked, but now I use it all the time for personal projects. I like to make small Lua libs or fork existing Lua libs and include those in a lib directory in my LÖVE / LÖVR projects. Works fine for me.

Perhaps the only thing that sucks a bit about submodules, might be if you work with multiple people and some reference of a submodule is updated and you need to go into the submodule directory to update the reference locally. But I think that's the only thing, no big deal. I don't think you deal with this issue much when you work by yourself on a solo project, on a single machine.

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

#143

Post by coffeebeqn »

VikingCoder wrote: post #141

Please help me figure out the best way to share code between Github repositories... I love C#, and I acknowledge Github as the king of source control. I make a new Repository a couple times a week, and use Visual Studio Code to clone it, and open a terminal and "dotnet new gitignore" and then use dotnet to make new projects all over the place... On multiple machines, even. On a VM on my NAS. On my Windows machine. On…

Monorepo?

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

#144

Post by raincole »

monkeyelite wrote: post #129
danielbarla wrote: post #2

> I genuinely believe making games without a big "do everything" engine can be easier, more fun, and often less overhead. I am not making a "do everything" game and I do not need 90% of the features these engines provide. At that point, of course, you don't need the engine. Having said that, every time I've really deep-dived into some particular feature of an engine - such as inverse kinematics and animation blending…

> inverse kinematics and animation blending Either this is a central feature of your game, and writing it is worth it. Or it’s a technical boondoggle, and you don’t need it.

It's just so wrong. These things are very standardized, and you often just want the common implementation that everyone is using. Writing these in most cases is like writing your own SHA256.

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

#145

Post by coffeebeqn »

herbst wrote: post #104
npinsker wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes you have to do business with counterparties you don't trust. It's not mature or practical to take an "all-or-nothing" approach while the engine has virtually no competition for many classes of games.

Building a business fully depending on a party you don't trust sounds kinda delusional.

I mean I’ve been using Unity since 2008. I do trust them to be around more than most other tooling/saas companies? Even if they have mode some unsound business decisions

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

#146

Post by VikingCoder »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #143
VikingCoder wrote: post #141

Please help me figure out the best way to share code between Github repositories... I love C#, and I acknowledge Github as the king of source control. I make a new Repository a couple times a week, and use Visual Studio Code to clone it, and open a terminal and "dotnet new gitignore" and then use dotnet to make new projects all over the place... On multiple machines, even. On a VM on my NAS. On my Windows machine. On…

Monorepo?

I hate that you're almost certainly right.

It feels like there should be a good way to have a dotnet classlib in one repository, and use it from others, but it just doesn't feel like they fit together the way they should.

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

#147

Post by wsc981 »

corysama wrote: post #133
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…

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…

There's the Local Lua Debugger [0]. I don't know how it compares to decoda, but I experimented a bit with this debugger last weekend and it seems nice enough - well integrated into VS Code.

---

[0]: https://github.com/tomblind/local-lua-debugger-vscode

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

#148

Post by jbjbjbjb »

VikingCoder wrote: post #141

Please help me figure out the best way to share code between Github repositories... I love C#, and I acknowledge Github as the king of source control. I make a new Repository a couple times a week, and use Visual Studio Code to clone it, and open a terminal and "dotnet new gitignore" and then use dotnet to make new projects all over the place... On multiple machines, even. On a VM on my NAS. On my Windows machine. On…

Make your own packages for your extensions and pull that packages into your projects that need to reference those extensions.

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

#149

Post by VikingCoder »

jbjbjbjb wrote: post #148
VikingCoder wrote: post #141

Please help me figure out the best way to share code between Github repositories... I love C#, and I acknowledge Github as the king of source control. I make a new Repository a couple times a week, and use Visual Studio Code to clone it, and open a terminal and "dotnet new gitignore" and then use dotnet to make new projects all over the place... On multiple machines, even. On a VM on my NAS. On my Windows machine. On…

Make your own packages for your extensions and pull that packages into your projects that need to reference those extensions.

And set up my own nuget repo?

I want my code to be private...?

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

#150

Post by raincole »

nico wrote: post #140
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…

Vibecoding is probably going to take this whole industry by storm Already the biggest market is small games on tablets/phones Now making those games is becoming exponentially faster and easier Roblox, allowing people to quickly create their own games, was already a huge hit. Now that experience is getting supercharged with AI

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