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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)

#51

Post by bob1029 »

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?

User interfaces for complex physical plants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_twin

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

#52

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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

Speaking for myself (who can program and all that), AI solves some of the tedium in my day job (building UI components). Most of that work nowadays is boilerplate.

But at the moment it's also helping me solve more complex issues with building applications - it's JS, so you can imagine how complex it can be.

I yearn for a simpler workflow to be honest, I don't want to rely on SO or LLMs to solve build issues. I want to work in Go but there's only a handful of companies using it in my country, plus my CV basically says I mainly did front-end in the past ~15 years.

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

#53

Post by Cthulhu_ »

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…

SDL is used in Factorio, which IMO is the best showcase of what is possible if you go all-in on e.g. C++ when it comes to performance, both in terms of what is rendered on screen and the mind-blowing numbers of what your factories are doing.

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

#54

Post by socalgal2 »

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…

I see making a game engine as the illusion of progress on making a game. Making a game engine is fun and relatively easy. You have a check list of things to do. Each of them the solutions are relatively well known. so you do them and make tons of progress. You get a window open, then you get a triangle up, then you get a texture loaded, then you get some basic text for debugging, then you read the keyboard for input, etc etc. each day new stuff comes up and you think you’re making progress but really you haven’t even started making the game , you’re just reproducing what you could have already had if you’d started with an existing engine.

Then you start it hit the more tedious stuff. loading animated characters, blending animations on selective subtrees of a character hierarchy. Making a level editor. Adding quality of life feature to it like undo. Etc…

I’m not saying you shouldn’t do this. It’s fun to do. just don’t delude yourself that that’s making progress on your game. It’s instead making progress on a game engine. That’s a different thing.

I've shipped 18 games, 4 of them AAA. I wrote the engines for most fo them. I wouldn't do it again.

All that said, some nuance. If the game you are making is simple for some defintion of simple, Celeste, Dead Cells, Geometry Wars. Then making your own engine isn't much work and there maybe some benefits.

On the other hand, see all the tiles made with engines. Silksong is Unity. A Short Hike is Unity. Blue Prince is Unity. Valheim is Unity. Peak is Unity. Dredge is Unity. You don't need to make your own engine to make an indie game.

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

#55

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jesse_dot_id wrote: post #20

This was a great read. I'm in my 40's and have mostly done web dev/devops type stuff throughout my career. Making video games has always eluded me even though I've always been interested in it. I think it's that everything feels like a brand new language I have to learn. Perhaps creating an engine is the move.

I'm no game developer, but I'd say don't create an engine if what you want to do is build a game. Do create an engine if you want to create an engine though.

But yeah, it is like learning a new language. But that's not a bad thing! I found messing around / following some tutorials for e.g. pico-8 to be both liberating (two characters are enough for a variable name) and educative (using functions like min/max to the fullest)

[0] https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

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

#56

Post by direwolf20 »

samiv wrote: post #48
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 th…

But you could create Quake.

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

#57

Post by socalgal2 »

bandrami wrote: post #44
rhdunn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Without ai my text editor auto completes letters into existing identifiers or adds a closing brace

With ai it add several lines of code at once as soon as it thinks it recognizes a common pattern.

It’s not perfect and it can get in the way but it’s amazing when it guesses right and spits out the next 3-4 lines I would have typed

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

#58

Post by hjkl0 »

redbell wrote: post #6

> Our game, Celeste I was really enjoying reading this piece until I read the above, then I realized I am reading for a big developer, the maker of, Celeste [1]. I am definitely adding this to my list of favorite articles about making games. Also, you may want to check a previous discussion from nine months ago (573 points, 246 comments ): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44038209 _____________ 1. https://store.s…

But Celeste came out in 2018. How is it relevant to 2025 as suggested in the title?

Also, pretty sure it was a small indie team rather than a “big developer”

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

#59

Post by truetraveller »

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

"People are so obsessed with using AI stuff for the sake of it, it’s nuts".

This is a GREAT observation. Thank you!

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

#60

Post by rhdunn »

bandrami wrote: post #44
rhdunn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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/string buffer write statements, or other repetitive code in the file it will often use that as a model for the generated code.

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