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So, you want to make a game engine (2023)

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Re: So, you want to make a game engine (2023)

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> perhaps i do need to be making an engine from scratch to keep myself interested you're not the only one. jonathan blow has made tons of money selling games and also needs to write a whole programming language for 100h to keep him interested enough to yield 1h of content. i can't really say much about the people who say don't program game engines (or whatever thing they don't like) in terms of opportunity costs (a g…

> i can't really say much about the people who say don't program game engines (or whatever thing they don't like) in terms of opportunity costs (a generous name for this category of complaining), other than they would be bad at both making art and making money. What a ridiculous take. Making a game engine is to games like building a camera is to making movies. Once a blue moon some new camera enables some new techniq…

> I'm watching a friend, claiming he wants to make a game company, burn through all of this money instead making a game engine. If he succeeds, great! But I suspect he'll just run out of money before he's even started working on a game. If it was fun to make, great too. But I think he'll look back on it as throwing away an oppotunity.

Been there, done that, didn't regret a thing since i'm certain i'd have given up way earlier (assuming i'd ever bother starting) if i had to use an existing engine :-P.

(ok, i never had money to "make a game company", the most money i ever had was to be able to spend ~2 years living frugally while making my own stuff, but it is close enough since i think someone could say i should have used some existing engine instead - which is true, except i'd hate doing that)

There are people who want to make games, people who want to make engines and, perhaps a minority, people who want to make games and engines :-P.

(though FWIW in my case i never felt the tech side was much of a limitation, it is art/content that ends up being the bottleneck and makes everything crawl down and the stuff i like to do aren't the kind of stuff you could do with procgen, minimalistic styles or other similar approaches for saving on the art/content side)

Re: So, you want to make a game engine (2023)

#33
post #2

I believe the instinct to develop a game engine or framework comes down from loving programming and being passionate about mastering a tool. We humans love mastering something and we love masters, when we build something from scratch we own it, we are master of it and we lead the decision. That's so comforting and pleasurable, and the reward we see at the end of the path motivates us. But on the process it's too hard…

What's doomcoding? (It's not mentioned in the article and it doesn't appear to be a related term when I google it.) It sounds negative ("doom" + "we should limit ourselves" from it) but everything you said in the context before that sounds good.

I took it to mean the frameworky coding you kind of get sucked into when you start a project when you realize off-the-shelf libraries are flawed or you could do so much better. Like the old trope of getting a task to write a billing system but first writing a full text mode UI framework, menu system, etc.

Re: So, you want to make a game engine (2023)

#35
I cannot recommend more to try the Ray Tracer challenge and if possible without AI.

It helps you build a full ray tracer / 3D engine only guided with tests, really powerful to learn test driven development.

What s cool is that just being driven with tests still allows you to do it in any language you want.

Plus you ll learn a quintillion of stuff about mathematics. This is really the kind of project that makes you go to a real senior SWE

Re: So, you want to make a game engine (2023)

#36
Reading the article show it talk about something else that build a "game engine" from scratch, what it says instead is *build a "engine"* to make the kind of games you will do over and over" that is more practical and attainable.

From developers this is how in-house frameworks work, that are mostly reusing other frameworks and libraries and create a sort of pseudo DSL.

Re: So, you want to make a game engine (2023)

#37
post #16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Balance is required for everything. There was a youtuber called Randy, he tried to build everything from scratch using C and it took him 6-7 years to finally release a game. Meanwhile I watched a youtuber who just made games from fake-ads in Unity and marketed it well and earned bunch of money. Do we want money or do we want to get the pleasure of being an engineer and make money as a side quest? There was a video of…

There is another angle: what if you want to express yourself, but, say, Unity is too limiting? Existing game engines were made to express existing ideas and while there is some stretch they do have hard limits.

Hard agree. AFAIK Jon Blow's Braid couldn't be made with an existing engine (at the time) due to its time warping mechanics.

That's a big reason I like developing games with frameworks. It allows reusibility and access to clever code, while still remaining flexible enough to support weird mechanics.

Re: So, you want to make a game engine (2023)

#40
Please check this interview with Lewis Nicolle who created his own game engine with D language for his new game Art of Reflection [1],[2].

[1] Why D Programming Language?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teWQbYvPBTg

[2] Art of Reflection:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2290770/The_Art_of_Reflec...

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