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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)

#41

Post by charcircuit »

bitwize wrote: post #16

Creating a game with an engine is like designing a character with a pixel dollbase. You can get something out quickly, skipping a few steps because they're done for you, but you have to live with whatever choices were made by the creator of the engine/dollbase. Those choices can constrain your execution and to some extent, your imagination.

While true, people overestimate how limiting it actually is. It's like wanting to make your own kernel for your application instead of using an off the shelf one like Linux. Sure you might be able to eek out some extra performance but there are so many upsides in reusing Linux.

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

#43

Post by flohofwoe »

simooooo wrote: post #36
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.

The big difference is that the big game engines have to cover all sorts of genres and scenarios, which often results in bloated "jack of all trades master of none" code compared to engine-layer code that's highly specialized for exactly one, or few very similar games.

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

#44

Post by bandrami »

rhdunn wrote: post #32
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 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 yo…

Genuine question re #1: does your text editor not already do that?

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

#45

Post by pjc50 »

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…

> 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 that the engine can uniquely determine from what volume you're in what the set of possibly visible quads is (if my memory is correct, oddly the engine uses quads rather than triangles) AND how to draw them in reverse order using painter's algorithm, because the software renderer doesn't have a z-buffer.

https://www.fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/quakeSourceRendit...

The BSP partitioning used to take several minutes to run back in the day.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that Carmack used a few, clever, high-impact techniques to achieve effects, which were also "imperfect but good enough".

If you're not Carmack, don't over-optimize until you've run a profiler.

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

#46

Post by tkel »

MasterScrat wrote: post #27
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would a game development pedigree correlate with rejecting AI? As Carmack said: > AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics.

[flagged]

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

#47

Post by raincole »

Madmallard wrote: post #11

Has he dealt with some of the more challenging problems in game dev that engines help a lot with? Like... multiplayer netcode. Seems like if you're doing this for a hobby or solo/small team then maybe it's reasonable. For most people where they want to be a game dev but they probably will just work in industry, it seems like learning the major engines to competency cannot be ignored.

> that engines help a lot with? Like... multiplayer netcode.

Rust (the top 10 most downloaded game ever on Steam) is built with Unity. However they ended up to write their own netcode anyway. Of course Unity isn't known for the best netcode, but how much an engine helps is often overstated. Genshin even bought Unity's source code to customize it.

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

#48

Post by samiv »

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…

"Also - study the code of the likes of Carmack. 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."

Also says something about the accumulation of complexity. At that time Carmack (and his team) were able to create a state of the art engine in a few years. Now consider the task today, if you were to create a state of the art engine today it'd take tremendously more work.

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

#49

Post by Cthulhu_ »

tkel wrote: post #46
MasterScrat wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a game development pedigree correlate with rejecting AI? As Carmack said: > AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics.

[flagged]

Slop is a garbage in, garbage out deal - in the hands of a competent developer who can review the changes, AI generated code is fine.

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

#50

Post by [deleted] »

bizzletk wrote: post #21
bob1029 wrote: post #5

The primary thing I'm going for in a commercial engine is platform targeting and stability. Some of the defaults are certainly "bland", but that ensures I can actually ship this thing to a meaningful % of the available market. Unity's coverage is so consistent that I've been debating using it for non gaming applications. There aren't many cross platform ecosystems that work this well.

What are some things that you'd build with Unity that aren't games?

[deleted]
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