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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)

#141

Post by wasting_time »

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…

I thought Celeste was a solo project of Maddy Thorson [0] before reading this piece.

0: https://maddymakesgames.com/

Fans of Celeste will almost certainly enjoy the local multiplayer game Towerfall by the same developers.

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

#142

Post by hu3 »

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…

C# + https://monogame.net

- Desktop: Windows, MacOS, Linux

- Mobile: Android, iOS, iPadOS

- Console: Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

It used to be XNA but then Microsoft discontinued and the community created the API compatible MonoGame.

Notable games: Terraria (when it was XNA), Stardew Valley, Celeste, Terraria and Fez.

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

#143

Post by endemic »

jesse_dot_id wrote: post #20

This was a great read. I'm in my 40's and have mostly done web dev/devops type stuff throughout my career. Making video games has always eluded me even though I've always been interested in it. I think it's that everything feels like a brand new language I have to learn. Perhaps creating an engine is the move.

If you're familiar with web development, you can make games with HTML/JS, which is almost its own "engine." Think DOM elements for sprites, CSS animations for movement, requestAnimationFrame for an update loop, etc. This has the extra benefit of zero friction for players -- no native app installation necessary!

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

#144

Post by throwaway2046 »

sbiru93 wrote: post #24

Very interesting article. It's kinda sad SFML never get quoted, It was my framework ( after ALLEGRO ) where i learned c++ and I think it dosen't get much love nowdays even if it is very light and strong

I've almost never seen SFML used in the wild. Does it offer anything significant over SDL?

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

#145

Post by lasgawe »

A lot of modern games do feel like they blend together visually, similar lighting models, motion blur, depth of field, texture streaming pop in and I think part of that comes from so many titles relying on the same engines. When more studios were building or heavily customizing their own engines, games tended to have a more distinct identity.

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

#146

Post by rahkiin »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #53
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…

SDL is used in Factorio, which IMO is the best showcase of what is possible if you go all-in on e.g. C++ when it comes to performance, both in terms of what is rendered on screen and the mind-blowing numbers of what your factories are doing.

And most gameplay is written in Lua

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

#147

Post by agentultra »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #109
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 kn…

It’ll last as long as there are humans who like making things themselves.

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

#148

Post by zeroq »

There's a huge difference between "making a game" and "shipping a game".

If journey is more important to you than the destination then developing games without an engine can be a great adventure.

But if you bank on shipping your product within budget and scope then you'd better pick up one. Any one. And stick with it.

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

#149

Post by roflcopter69 »

pjc50 wrote: post #93
roflcopter69 wrote: post #63

I read that article a while ago and highly enjoyed it. C# truly has become a very good language for game development and since NativeAOT has become a thing, we will less and less rely on hacks like IL2CPP or BRUTE which transpile the C# IL to C++ such that it can run on JIT restricted platforms like consoles or iOS. I'd really love to go all-in with C# and SDL3 to make an engine-less cross-platform game but I still m…

Interested in knowing your modern dotnet gamedev stack. Am I right in thinking that Unity are still stuck in ".NET Framework" era? How is Godot?

I myself don't have much of a dotnet gamedev stack going on unfortunately. Although I've been dabbling with MonoGame and have been enjoying it so far. MonoGame matured quite a bit since I previously used it which was more than 5 years ago!

Unity indeed is still using Mono instead of CoreCLR and is kinda stuck in that sense. But to be fair, they are trying to migrate to CoreCLR which will let them profit from all the crazy optimizations that Microsoft has poured into the runtime and ecosystem.

Godot is kind of a hate love for me when it comes to C#. Godot gives me the most hope that there can be a free, community-driven but powerful game engine and it having C# support built-in seems great at first glance until you realize that GDScript, which is veeeeery dynamic language, pretty much nullifies a lot of the advantages you'd get from using C# because you find yourself doing weird type system stuff that GDScript imposes on all the other languages. The best you can do is doing as much as possible in C# and use Godot as kind of a input and rendering abstraction layer. But then you're missing out on a lot of the functionality that Godot offers which should raise the question why use a game engine in the first place. It's difficult, at least for me. Others might have figured it out much better.

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

#150

Post by threethirtytwo »

agentultra wrote: post #147
threethirtytwo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kn…

It’ll last as long as there are humans who like making things themselves.

That’s what they said about assembly coders.
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