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Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)

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

#211

Post by bandrami »

meheleventyone wrote: post #133
rhdunn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text editors/IDEs have simple autocomplete and the ability to do some expansion, e.g. a for loop with placeholders to fill in. Those work and are still useful. JetBrains also has local line-based LLM models for various languages. With the LLM-based autocomplete it a) generally autocompletes more code at once, and b) will often pick up on patterns in the existing code. E.g. if you have a similar method, list of print/…

The JetBrains local autocomplete is hilarious but occasionally useful. I find it really hit and miss in terms of when it will decide to autocomplete and whether it will exhastively complete all elements, miss some out or get itself into a loop over several.

The out-of-the-box stuff is supposed to be kind of stupid. Are you guys really not editing your own snippets and shortcuts? Have people really been typing out "def do_something(foo, bar, baz)\n\t" manually?

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

#212

Post by Klaster_1 »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #201
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.

Compared to generic Serious Sam like maps of TP1, I found beautiful environments of TP2 really added another level of appreciation to the game. Those and the music surface up in my memory couple times a week, very few games had this effect on me - maybe only TES3. The game is magical and I'd love more of that.

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

#213

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

Klaster_1 wrote: post #212
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Compared to generic Serious Sam like maps of TP1, I found beautiful environments of TP2 really added another level of appreciation to the game. Those and the music surface up in my memory couple times a week, very few games had this effect on me - maybe only TES3. The game is magical and I'd love more of that.

Oh it was definitely beautiful, it just never seemed relevant to what was happening. More like the art team run amok. TP1 at least had an in universe explanation for the shape of the world.

Spoilers…kinda

I guess Athena and crew have invented literal universe manipulation powers? Allowing them to craft whatever beauty they see fit. Yet, their living quarters always seem to be some dingy basement lab with power cables and other miscellaneous garbage strewn about. The wondrous environments seemed fully disconnected from everything else in the world.

If they had the time and the budget, go nuts, but the game would have been perfectly suitable with significantly lower fidelity graphics.

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

#214

Post by jamesfinlayson »

BearOso wrote: post #135
pjc50 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Things like the famous fast inverse square root are short, but I would hesitate to describe it as simple. Ironically one of the things that the Quake engine relies on is clever culling. Like Doom, the level is stored in a pre-computed binary space partition tree so th…

> Things like the famous fast inverse square root are short, but I would hesitate to describe it as simple. Not the best example. That snippet was in use at SGI for years and actually written by Gary Tarolli. Quake's optimization was mostly done by Michael Abrash. The original id engines were also famously inflexible. They fit the mold of "developing an engine, not a game" to a T. What you saw them do was all they co…

What changes were needed in Half-Life? Quake seemed okay enough to modify though it was rushed and getting close to what was possible with the hardware at the time.

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

#216

Post by roflcopter69 »

cyber_kinetist wrote: post #205
dxuh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Sounds interesting! Have you published this somewhere? I wonder how well this works when you want to compile some complex dependencies. Have you compared compile times between your solution and when using CMake?

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

#217

Post by debugnik »

hu3 wrote: post #142
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.

Note than many games have used Monogame on console but FNA on PC instead.

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

#218

Post by spiffyk »

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…

The indie gamedev scene is full of people for whom games are an art form. These people don't give two hoots about what "the industry" prioritizes, they just want to make their games their way.

Calling their creations slop and suggesting using AI to make them is honestly quite the insult.

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

#219

Post by dxuh »

cyber_kinetist wrote: post #205
dxuh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

But CMake only reruns, when CMakeLists.txt has changed. That doesn't happen a lot after the core of the project has been set up for me. Especially not when I am tweaking a game mechanic or something.

Also if you want your project to compile with Ninja on Linux, but also with MSVC and you want cross-compilation (on Linux for Windows) and an Emscripten build (I do want all of those), then rebuilding CMake is quite a lot of work.

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

#220

Post by throw_away_623 »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #213
Klaster_1 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to generic Serious Sam like maps of TP1, I found beautiful environments of TP2 really added another level of appreciation to the game. Those and the music surface up in my memory couple times a week, very few games had this effect on me - maybe only TES3. The game is magical and I'd love more of that.

Oh it was definitely beautiful, it just never seemed relevant to what was happening. More like the art team run amok. TP1 at least had an in universe explanation for the shape of the world. Spoilers…kinda I guess Athena and crew have invented literal universe manipulation powers? Allowing them to craft whatever beauty they see fit. Yet, their living quarters always seem to be some dingy basement lab with power cables…

A lot of the game was spent walking from puzzle to puzzle. I think prioritising graphics was a good choice, because one was forced to notice the landscape.
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