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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

#211

Post by monkeyelite »

andrewflnr wrote: post #203
monkeyelite wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure I’m expressing a value judgment, a design preference - not an eternal truth. And the principle is I want to spent the effort on the most important features in which case it’s not a big deal to write them. Your best features become better than if they were cobbled together in Unity.

That is, to be generous, a rather extreme and niche value judgement that corresponds to no utility I can think of. Real life has a spectrum of "important features" and a corresponding spectrum of justified effort. If that's your idea of artistic integrity, then you do you, but for anyone else it's probably nonsense.

> to be generous, a rather extreme and niche value judgement that corresponds to no utility I can think of

Ok, well I look forward to seeing your games then, as I’m sure you’re skilled at shipping.

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

#212

Post by BryanLegend »

hbn wrote: post #210
BryanLegend wrote: post #209

Hate to be mean, but this guys last game was a complete failure after multiple years of development: https://www.exok.com/posts/2025-01-22-earthblade-final-updat...

That's not a failure, it was just never finished. And more because of personal matters than anything technical. I'm not sure why this is relevant.

Of course it was relevant. If they had a better game engine it would have been further along.

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

#213

Post by dismalaf »

Supermancho wrote: post #190
dismalaf wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Visual editing is how all UI is designed. It's not a waste of time. Visual editing is the primary way to prototype, which means it's heavily used at the beginning and less as development goes forward. Projects have some process to translate the prototypes into scaffolding UI in the Editor, then modify with state where necessary. This pipeline is common across all types of software.

Sorry, I thought the context was clear given the parent. Making your own visual editor is a waste of time when ones exist that will output a format you can simply put into your game.

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

#214

Post by hbn »

BryanLegend wrote: post #212
hbn wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a failure, it was just never finished. And more because of personal matters than anything technical. I'm not sure why this is relevant.

Of course it was relevant. If they had a better game engine it would have been further along.

The article you yourself linked says the game's development troubles were from pressure to surpass their previous game which was a smash hit.

How would a better engine fix that?

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

#215

Post by Balooga »

Narishma wrote: post #206
lukan wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> So instead of focusing on release by that time, you will now focus on reinplementing that needed functionality that just stopped working. That makes no sense. A library being abandoned doesn't mean it suddenly stops working.

The library would continue to work but may no longer be usable if other dependencies require a later version of "n" that the abandoned library is incompatible with. Ruby or Python runtimes are the classic example.

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

#216

Post by johnnyanmac »

Narishma wrote: post #206
lukan wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> So instead of focusing on release by that time, you will now focus on reinplementing that needed functionality that just stopped working. That makes no sense. A library being abandoned doesn't mean it suddenly stops working.

Support for any studio larger than a few people is the most important part of 3rd party tools. If (and inevitably, when) a tool has a bug or can't do something you need, there's reassurance being able to tell someone else to fix the problem.

Using abandoned tools either means you're very sure all use cases are covered, or that your own engineers are willing to hack around should it not be sufficient. And I think anyone who works with legacy code knows that navigating already written codebases without guidance can take just as long as whipping up a custom implementation.

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

#217

Post by iFire »

nico wrote: post #169
iFire wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you vibe code a game engine your best llm will need to do the work of world class technical team of like 12 people, you’ll need to get 10-20 teams to be able to find that dataset. Each run costing a few million usd.

Not sure what that use case is. Why would you need all of that? As an individual, if you are just trying to build a basic game with your kids you don't need to build a whole engine nor a world class technical team or a huge dataset You can either use chatgpt or something more basic like openjam.ai or something specialized like rosebud.ai Maybe the people at rosebud.ai have been doing what you are suggesting to build…

Not everyone wants the biggest technology companies to own the process.

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

#218

Post by symfoniq »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #96

This is basically what I did a couple years ago [1]. SDL2 and a bit of C++ to create a "sprite" class. Some collision code in the sprite class... If you want to call what I added an "engine" it was more like a pedal-assist bike. Too often I find "engines" end up driving the project/game. That is, you end up writing the game to the engine. It's why I've avoided Unity, etc. — high-level engines like that seem to guide…

Just wanted to say that I remember playing your game as a kid on the family Mac IIci. Thanks for the fun memories, and best wishes.

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

#219

Post by bitwize »

If you're serious about making video games, you should probably be using a commercial engine. Period. No exceptions. Unless you're EA or Microsoft, you're just not going to develop a custom engine that can compete with Unity and Unreal. You may be able to write a good basic rendering pipeline and event loop, but the major engines have enormous ecosystems of tooling and talent, ready to go, and they're available across all major platforms including proprietary consoles. Things will go much, much easier for you if you just use those.

If you're just fucking around, do what you want, but if you actually want to ship, it's Unity or Unreal all the way.

And no, I don't think Godot is "there" yet. If Unreal is Photoshop, then Unity is Photopea and Godot is GIMP.

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

#220

Post by archagon »

npinsker wrote: post #13
_m6gi wrote: post #9

Many people often say that making an engine from scratch takes too long. But how long does it take to properly learn Unreal or Unity such that you can have an idea and turn it into a game without friction? Presumably, once your engine is finished, you are at that level of expertise instantly, which is a huge time saver. In my opinion, the more experienced of an engineer you are, the more the scales tip in the favor o…

I am not familiar with Unreal, but Unity is much faster than programming from scratch, easily 10x or more. One obvious example is physics behavior, which you can add to your game in under a minute, but with your own engine you'd need a day or two to properly integrate an external library. All the internal state visualization that Noel's showing off here is already built in by default in Unity. It has nice tools to dr…

At least as far as platformers go, physics feel is a crucial part of the whole experience, and outsourcing to an engine has a good chance of making your game feel cookie-cutter.
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