Making video games (without an engine) in 2025 • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by unclad5968 » Tue, May 20, 2025, 3:14 PM UTC

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…

How does any other language do this? I bounce between submodules and monorepo for hobby projects and both approaches have some issues. I'm not a git expert so working with monorepos are a little easier to work with for me.

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

#152

Post by nico » Tue, May 20, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC

raincole wrote: post #150

nico wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

Such a hostile comment. Just trying to open up the conversation. No need for snark or aggressive name calling

The article is about creating video games without an engine, and the top comment is about what is hard about making video games

My comment is about how all of that is changing right now and how the public is reacting to it

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

#153

Post by OnionBlender » Tue, May 20, 2025, 3:21 PM UTC

varbhat wrote: post #79

Isn't that a huge effort? I remember few games which developed their own game engines from scratch (factorio, limbo, bg3). But, wouldn't it be easier and better to use game engines like godot?

I suppose it depends where you draw the line between engine and framework. Factorio used parts of Allegro until 2018.

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-230

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

#154

Post by orthoxerox » Tue, May 20, 2025, 3:21 PM UTC

A lot of the time the indie game developer is a former professional programmer. This of course affects how they interact with the game development process.

Someone who's coming from a different walk of life (say, an artist or a TTRPG designer trying to make a game) will obviously be much more productive with an off-the-shelf engine like GameMaker or Unity. They accept the engine with its editor as the only way to make a game and get cracking.

A programmer opens the editor and is presented with the 3D scene editor. "Nonono, where's main()?" they immediately ask. "Why is there a 3D scene editor if I want to procgen my levels?" "How do mods work?" "Who told you I needed physics simulation in my game by default?" "Running the game inside the editor is cool and all that, but I'd rather run the editor inside the game."

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

#155

Post by lukan » Tue, May 20, 2025, 3:23 PM UTC

agentultra wrote: post #116

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…

Keep in mind that when writing your own "engine," you don't need it to be as general as possible to handle every possible kind of game. You just need it to handle your game. And there are plenty of libraries and frameworks that can be pulled in to handle things like UI, compression, etc. The OP uses imGUI which is an excellent, small UI library for making in-game editors. When choosing to go down that path you're not…

It is still a lot of work.

And every external libary you do pull in, to ease some of the workload, is just waiting to go abandonend next year. So instead of focusing on release by that time, you will now focus on reinplementing that needed functionality that just stopped working.

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

#156

Post by Lichtso » Tue, May 20, 2025, 3:31 PM UTC

Made me realize that most of the games I really enjoyed have their own custom engines (made for a single game or franchise): Starbound, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Factorio, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Empire Earth, The Sims, Project Zomboid ...

Only exception might be Portal, but even that is using an in-house solution mostly for developed for one franchise.

Like with most things: If you are new and have to learn everything or if you actually need to pump titles out you should prefer quantity over quality and the major game engines are the way to go. But, if you really want to polish something it will require a long long time and then investing in engine development can pay off. The trap is starting with the later if you haven't made a few dozen games yet and never shipped anything. Then it will stay that way.

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

#157

Post by lukan » Tue, May 20, 2025, 3:34 PM UTC

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…

I guess the main disadvantage with a custom engine vs Unity, is that you must train new people in it all, vs hiring experts in the tools.

Your custom engine sounds interesting, though. I can recognize some thoughts ..

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

#158

Post by jebarker » Tue, May 20, 2025, 3:37 PM UTC

Lichtso wrote: post #156

Made me realize that most of the games I really enjoyed have their own custom engines (made for a single game or franchise): Starbound, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Factorio, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Empire Earth, The Sims, Project Zomboid ... Only exception might be Portal, but even that is using an in-house solution mostly for developed for one franchise. Like with most things: If you are new and have to learn everythin…

Just to clarify, are you saying that if you've never shipped any games then you should start with an established engine and only go artisanal once you have that experience?

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

#159

Post by dismalaf » Tue, May 20, 2025, 3:48 PM UTC

NotGMan wrote: post #33

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…

This. When working on your own engine you also feel as if 90% of the time is spend on user interface creation if you actually want to have an visual editor. People don't realize that they will spend 95% of the time on the engine and 5% on the game. Which is ok if you don't want to make a commercial living out of it. But unless you are making a game with extremely specific needs (eg Factorio) using your own engine wil…

Visual editors are a waste of time. For 2D, lots of solutions exist (Tiled for example). For 3D, you can use Blender as your editor.

The key to making no engine work is to make only what you actually need.

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

#160

Post by doawoo » Tue, May 20, 2025, 3:49 PM UTC

I always saw it like this:

- If you're building an engine without a game in mind, you're just going to end up with tools you don't use.

- If you have a game you want to see to the end, and make an engine for it, you're going to build exactly what you need and nothing else. With the bonus of having lots of code you can reuse for the next project.

All that said I'm sticking with Godot since I have limited time, and if I want to bang out a quick gameplay idea to see if it even works, I don't want to start from nothing. (I say all this after building a 2.5D-ish engine with c# and monogame)