Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
A storied history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimRefinery
Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
61–70 of 225 posts
Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#62> 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…
I also reached the same conclusion, it feels wholesome
Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#63I read that article a while ago and highly enjoyed it. C# truly has become a very good language for game development and since NativeAOT has become a thing, we will less and less rely on hacks like IL2CPP or BRUTE which transpile the C# IL to C++ such that it can run on JIT restricted platforms like consoles or iOS.
I'd really love to go all-in with C# and SDL3 to make an engine-less cross-platform game but I still miss a good way to make complex game UIs without doing everything from scratch. Does anyone have a good suggestion for making non-trivial game UIs without using a full game engine? So far, I only found https://github.com/vchelaru/Gum and https://github.com/mikke89/RmlUi but I think there's not really something super mature and feature packed, or is there? I'm aware of https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, as the article also mentioned, but that's more for debug UIs, right?
Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#64Earlier 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]
Are you saying Carmack isn't a "talented and successful developer"?
Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#65> 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…
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Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I'm trying to think of a text editor that doesn't support customizable snippets and templates, and failing
Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/…
That sure sounds like you're describing customizable snippets, which AFAIK every major editor supports?
Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#68Has 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.
multiplayer netcode isnt overly difficult to write unless you're at the highest lvl of complexity lol. it's not a black box, it's just transferring bytes around efficiently and keeping track of state, your "netcode" can literally just be bare tcp (+ssl), validation, and state, it's not that deep.
Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Won’t you get much better results trying to maximize utilization of some sort of LLM? For many people, you’d get faster and better results trying to optimize for LLMs than for any standard word processor or music composition tool.
Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#70Nice 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…
For more context, I've developed over 200 games[0] using libGDX and threejs. I've learnt so much from working with code-oriented frameworks that are closer to the system APIs. I can never imagine if I could do all that in today full-blown game engines in term of effectiveness and development speed.
[0]: https://ookigame.com