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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)

#31

Post by nkrisc »

imtringued wrote: post #7

>I often find the default feature implementations in large engines like Unity so lacking I end up writing my own anyway. Eventually, my projects end up being mostly my own tools and systems, and the engine becomes just a vehicle for a nice UI and some rendering... I honestly don't see anything wrong with using the engine for its UI and "some rendering" kind of sweeps a lot of the complicated 3d light handling under t…

> I honestly don't see anything wrong with using the engine for its UI and "some rendering" kind of sweeps a lot of the complicated 3d light handling under the rug. I think the biggest mistake large engines have made is baking in features as first class citizens instead of those features being part of a standard plugin you could have written yourself from scratch once you reach that stage.

Godot is more or less built that way. The entire node system is an abstraction over the various “servers” and you can even completely forgo it if you want, providing your own MainLoop implementation (instead of the included SceneTree implementation of MainLoop) and then just use the servers directly.

A lot of the editor features are also implemented as plugins. It’s been very easy turning the Godot editor into a custom editor for my game by writing some simple plugins

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

#32

Post by rhdunn »

dwroberts wrote: post #19
Vespasian wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they'll take a look at what, if anything at all,they can use in their workflow as a useful tool not a magic solution. No need to brag about that.

> can use in their workflow as a useful tool not a magic solution. Like what? If you can already program your game and create art for it, what is it going to be doing? People are so obsessed with using AI stuff for the sake of it, it’s nuts

I don't use AI for the sake of it, I use it where and when it is useful. For example:

1. advanced autocomplete -- if you have or paste the structure of a JSON or other format, or a class fields, it is good at autocompleting things like serialization, case statements, or other repetitive/boilerplate code;

2. questions -- it can often be difficult to find an answer on Google/etc. (esp. if you don't know exactly what you are looking for, or if Google decides to ignore a key term such as the programming language), but can be better via an AI.

Like all tools, you need to read, check, and verify its output.

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

#33

Post by samiv »

sgt wrote: post #22

What's the best place to get some cool graphics assets, sound etc when making a love2d or sdl or {yourfavoritetech} game?

Don't know about "cool" but I always end up going back to opengameart.org

While most of the stuff is one off assets that do not fit together there are also some nice sets by some creators such as Kenney or Emcee Flesher

Also the Liberated Pixel Cup (LPC) stuff is pretty nice.

Mind you I mostly just look for 2D assets.

https://opengameart.org/users/kenney

https://opengameart.org/users/emcee-flesher

https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-collection

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

#34

Post by dwroberts »

segh wrote: post #23
dwroberts wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can use in their workflow as a useful tool not a magic solution. Like what? If you can already program your game and create art for it, what is it going to be doing? People are so obsessed with using AI stuff for the sake of it, it’s nuts

I can do long division manually but I still reach for a calculator.

Do you also spend a lot of time maximising calculator utilisation in other places? Maybe trying to write letters with it or composing music with it?

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

#35

Post by raincole »

JoeyJoJoJr wrote: post #9
rimmontrieu wrote: post #4

Nice article, engines are bloated and introduce so many overheads. If you don't intend to ship any AAA games, consider investing your times to learn code-first game frameworks like libGDX, MonoGame, love2d,... or even lower level stuffs like SDL, bgfx, opengl which are good enough for almost any cases. A bit higher learning curve is expected but it won't hide anything from you, or bury you under tons of bloated abstr…

I’d highly recommend going with SDL if it’s 2D. IMO libraries like MonoGame, Love2D, LibGDX only offer small conveniences over SDL with big negative tradeoffs, sacrificing portability, quality of libraries, and conventions. The downsides of using C++ are now heavily mitigated with the use AI tools. I could never jell with C++ until I had Cursor hold my hand (especially around the build system), and now I feel like I…

I'm actually building my own mini-engine with SDL_GPU. It works ok so far. I'm quite confident that it's capable enough to replicate most of Unity's URP features (except the shader graph as I don't plan to expose such an interface for artists).

But I haven't reached to the more tedious parts, like doing skeleton animation on GPU and testing cross platform (SDL should be naturally cross platform, but I never tested it...), etc. The most tedious part, imo, is to build your own 3D scene editor.

At very least I can say SDL has reached a passable state for 3D. It doesn't support some modern features like bindless though.

And one doesn't need to stich with C++ if they don't want to. SDL is pure C and if your favorite language can call foreign function it's not that hard to make it work with SDL.

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

#36

Post by simooooo »

rimmontrieu wrote: post #4

Nice article, engines are bloated and introduce so many overheads. If you don't intend to ship any AAA games, consider investing your times to learn code-first game frameworks like libGDX, MonoGame, love2d,... or even lower level stuffs like SDL, bgfx, opengl which are good enough for almost any cases. A bit higher learning curve is expected but it won't hide anything from you, or bury you under tons of bloated abstr…

Nobody seems to consider that doing it yourself, requires you implement it at least as efficiently as the commercial engine did, otherwise you're just creating a worse-performing implementation that seems to behave just like a bloated engine does.

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

#37

Post by kurtdev »

sgt wrote: post #22

What's the best place to get some cool graphics assets, sound etc when making a love2d or sdl or {yourfavoritetech} game?

For prototyping I usually use Kenney assets (from kenney.nl). Theres lots of assets for many types of games which lets you rapidly prototype and iterate without worrying about making assets first. For sounds you can use BFXR and just play around. Sometimes playing around with sounds can even lead to new feature ideas :)

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

#38

Post by Subdivide8452 »

sbiru93 wrote: post #24

Very interesting article. It's kinda sad SFML never get quoted, It was my framework ( after ALLEGRO ) where i learned c++ and I think it dosen't get much love nowdays even if it is very light and strong

SFML definitely needs more love than it's receiving.

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

#39

Post by spppedury »

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…

when Quake was being written, it was pushing the level of managable complexity at the time.

they used NeXT workstations to develop it, the programming tools on PCs were too weak for such a project

today it might look simple, but it's easy to say that when you open it in VS Code and have Intellisense, autocomplete, go to definition, ultra fast compilers, tons of RAM, and google for everything

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