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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)

#201

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

the__alchemist wrote: post #175

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…

Not sure there is anything to take away from Talos Principle 2. It was a puzzle + philosophical musings adventure. Could have achieved the same effect with Quake level graphics. So much needless vast (pretty) landscape you had to circumnavigate just to get to the next puzzle arena.

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

#202

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

PacificSpecific wrote: post #85
hjkl0 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

How is it not relevant? Celeste wasn't exactly a pinnacle of bleeding edge technology when it came out. If I remember correctly it was a team of 2.

It was also originally created for the PICO8 platform. Which is as minimal as you can get.

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

#203

Post by pibaker »

spiffyk wrote: post #92
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…

I think the biggest mistake you can make is shifting your mindset from making a game to making a game engine . No, you still want to be dead set on making your game , you just don't have the ready-made building blocks from an off-the-shelf engine, so you have to make your own as you go, and only as needed. Personally, when I was working on my little game, I found it helpful to call the endeavour—just like Noel Berry…

> shifting your mindset from making a game to making a game engine

This reminds me of when someone makes his own static site generator, write one blog post about how he started a blog with his own static site generator, and then post nothing afterwards.

I suspect the reason for this genre of behavior is there is just a tremendous amount of creativity required to come up with anything original enough to justify putting into a game, or a blog, but game engines and static site generators have relatively straightforward feature requirements that you can just implement like any software feature. Building your own game engine or static site generator is just a good way to procrastinate doing the hard part of game making or blogging while still keeping yourself in the game making or blogging zone so that you can tell yourself, yes, I am a game developer or blogger.

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

#204

Post by direwolf20 »

bandrami wrote: post #140
rhdunn wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customizable snipping is a feature editors support (which I mentioned as they are related/similar to what the AI is doing), but is different to the AI autocomplete behaviour. If I have a JSON structure, I can paste that into the file as a comment, e.g.: # {"foo": 1, "bar": "test", "baz"} @dataclass class FooBar: foo: and the AI will/can autocomplete/generate that to: @dataclass class FooBar: foo: int bar: str baz: in…

Right, it's a less-flexible paste macro you don't actually have control over. shrug

It's a DWIM button.

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

#205

Post by cyber_kinetist »

dxuh wrote: post #78
roflcopter69 wrote: post #71

I see `dotnet watch` being mentioned for code hot reload which is such a great feature for quickly iterating on a game. Not having to restart the whole game just because one has changed a few if statements and values really helps staying in the flow. But I'm still not too enthusiastic about having GC in C# which is why ideally I'd like to start making a small 2D game just with SDL3 and C++ but how could I get this ni…

I quite like modern C++, so I really tried to make it work for gamedev, but I think you can't really do it. You can use all the modern C++ features that are not in the standard library though! I am working on a little game the last few months and after a while I just decided to not use any of the C++ standard library (I just use a few C headers) and make my own Vector, Array, Span, String, FlatMap. And using those th…

Note that if you want to go a bit further, you should make your own minimal build system that replaces CMake. That alone will make your project compile much faster!

I've made my own in Python that generates Ninja files only - and it's surprisingly not that much work (especially if Claude Code can help you).

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

#206

Post by ehnto »

the__alchemist wrote: post #175

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…

Jonathan Blow seems to stand very strongly on principles, and yet be extremely pragmatic while executing them, which I feel is a good balance that still results in shipping games. That said if he didn't have the work ethic that he does, it probably wouldn't have been a winning strategy.

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

#207

Post by diath »

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…

There's also a middle ground - using a framework that already abstracts away things like graphics, window, audio and input handling but acts as a "bring your own engine" base. This is probably the best if you have a specific type of game in mind where generic solutions wouldn't really work. Things like Raylib, SFML, Love2D and so on are a great compromise.

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

#208

Post by deterministic »

Don't fall into the trap of making an engine instead of making a game.

Unless of course you deep down don't really want to make a game.

If you really want to make a game then start on the game and then figure out what external tools are useful for that game.

(I have released 2 commercial games with engines written by me - I would not do that again).

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

#209

Post by truetraveller »

bubblewand wrote: post #108
bandrami wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sure sounds like you're describing customizable snippets, which AFAIK every major editor supports?

Sitting here on the sidelines having never configured snippets or macros or any of that in any of my editors, which I could have done like 30 years ago but never bothered in all this time, doing quizzical-dog look at all these people thrilled about LLMs. I guess they might finally get me to use those things since they take the “configuring” and “remembering shortcuts” part out, but so much of this doesn’t look new at…

In my objective opinion, almost all AI uses cases (coding or otherwise), are just because of people's extreme laziness in spending a little time setting up some "automated" workflow, be it canned templates or whatever. The non-AI approach has the added benefit of being precise!

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

#210

Post by mock-possum »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #10
rob74 wrote: post #2

After I read the title, I fully expected this to be about writing games using AI. But no, actually there is no mention of AI to be found in the text, not even in the "Miscellaneous Thoughts" section, which seems to be mostly answers to "why don't you use X?" questions. Refreshing...

The author is Noel Berry, creator of Celeste. They don't shout about it, but with that pedigree, I'm confident they'll be staying well away from AI.

Because Celeste is left-aligned, and deriding AI as planet-destroying slop stolen from poor artist is a left position to take.
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