Live data from Hacker News

Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)

noelberry.ca

191–200 of 225 posts

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

#191

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…

OpenFL should cover your needs pretty well. https://openfl.org

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

#192

3 anecdotes: - For Talos Principle 2, Croteam switched from their own engine to UE5. The description was "It would be like attempting to sprint and catch up with a train that is already far down the track and accelerating even faster.". From a user's perspective, observe the graphics of Serious Sam Siberian Mayhem and Talos Principle 2: Same company, released at a similar time. Talos Principle (UE5) looks dramaticall…

Then again,UE5 has massive criticism leveraged against it- for pushing exotic and hyped up technology, that is not really production ready and demands you tailor your whole workflow around them. Held against last gen custom engines - ue5 almost always looks worse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls4QS3F8rJU&t=539s

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

#193
A bit off topic. But I think that if the speed of today's LLMs would be a factor 1000 faster, we would need no general purpose engines or frameworks to build a game. One could prompt a complete custom game including all the parts that make the game. Engine. Physics, assets. Sounds, level design everything. Capabilities of for example opus is enough to achieve this. Its only slow.

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

#194
on that theme it reminds my of the Pico-8 community (although technically it is an engine but you dont need to do engine programming even for generating music!!)

compiled a personal webpage to play with mobile controls and a javascript engine to play the pico-8 games and i love the celeste port on that!

https://rohitjha.com/labs/flynns-arcade

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

#195
post #75

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…

And, of course, the next level of procrastination is to develop your own programming language, which you will use to write the engine to use in creating the game :-) Definitely hats off to Jon for pulling it off - he had a lot of focus and some previous experience - and it also helps to have re$ource$ from past successful games. For many of us, the lure of developing better tools, rather than the end product, proves to be too strong to resist. At least Jon stopped short of developing own OS :-)

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

#196

3 anecdotes: - For Talos Principle 2, Croteam switched from their own engine to UE5. The description was "It would be like attempting to sprint and catch up with a train that is already far down the track and accelerating even faster.". From a user's perspective, observe the graphics of Serious Sam Siberian Mayhem and Talos Principle 2: Same company, released at a similar time. Talos Principle (UE5) looks dramaticall…

Did you play the Talos Principle Reawakened? They took a great performing game made with their own engine, re-released it with UE5, and now it performs like doggy doodoo.

I did. Was kind of underwhelmed by the graphics too. Although that may be in line with a remake. Ie, I gave it benefit of the doubt since I don't know how much effort they put into it beyond "making it work".

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

#197
post #156

I've been working on Metropolis 1998[1] for +4 years now. Custom C++ engine built with a modified version of SFML 2.5 and SQLite. Creating my own engine was both a personal and strategic decision for me. I was really worried about running into performance issues with generalist engines, and I did not want the friction of working with someone else's mental model. Pretty sure that friction would have caused so much bur…

This looks wonderful! After playing Cities Skylines 2 for the last week, all I can say is that as long as you have a half-decent traffic system, I'll be happy!

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

#198
post #156

I've been working on Metropolis 1998[1] for +4 years now. Custom C++ engine built with a modified version of SFML 2.5 and SQLite. Creating my own engine was both a personal and strategic decision for me. I was really worried about running into performance issues with generalist engines, and I did not want the friction of working with someone else's mental model. Pretty sure that friction would have caused so much bur…

This is exactly where you need to build your own engine, because using UE4/5 wouldn’t give you the scope you need to run at the size you want.

See also: Factorio.

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

#199
I started making a raycaster from scratch in C which I wanted to turn into a game engine [0]

Was my first C project to learn C as a 4 year self taught dev.

Will revisit it in a years time (working on something big) and try implement my full vision - minecraft-like worlds but if it was fully raycasted

[0] - https://github.com/con-dog/chunked-z-level-raycaster

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

#200

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.

There's a tendency to ascribe the entirety of id's technology to Carmack. Michael Abrash, as one example, was a major factor.

Post reply on HN