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Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
91–100 of 225 posts
Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#92My 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 think the biggest mistake you can make is shifting your mindset from making a game to making a game engine. No, you still want to be dead set on making your game, you just don't have the ready-made building blocks from an off-the-shelf engine, so you have to make your own as you go, and only as needed. Personally, when I was working on my little game, I found it helpful to call the endeavour—just like Noel Berry in TFA—"making a game without an engine", rather than "making a custom game engine". I only really wrote the absolutely necessary plumbing that I needed for the game I was making, nothing more.
The same goes for software libraries in general, I think. Just make your program. Don't make an overly general library for something you won't need anyway. If the code proves useful for reuse, just factor it out after the fact and generalize as needed.
EDIT: Typos, wording
Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#93I 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 m…
Interested in knowing your modern dotnet gamedev stack. Am I right in thinking that Unity are still stuck in ".NET Framework" era? How is Godot?
Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#94A lot of modern games ‘feel’ the same to me now. Same sort of lighting, blur.. even the texture loading and pop in. They all sort of blend into one mess.
I liked when games all felt very distinctly different and I feel like part of that was that they all varied on ‘engine’
Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#95I see `dotnet watch` being mentioned for code hot reload which is such a great feature for quickly iterating on a game. Not having to restart the whole game just because one has changed a few if statements and values really helps staying in the flow. But I'm still not too enthusiastic about having GC in C# which is why ideally I'd like to start making a small 2D game just with SDL3 and C++ but how could I get this ni…
C++ is really not very amenable to this because every change to the contents of a class messes up your entire memory layout. "game as DLL" is definitely a viable solution to that, but so is "game in scripting engine": many games delegate a lot of their mechanics to e.g. Lua precisely because it's so easy to tweak in-engine if you just want to change a bonus from 5% to 10% and so on.
Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#96The 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?
Not OP, but at £JOB, I use Unity most of the time making demo and sales apps for clients to use at shows. The fact that it can build for basically every common platform and (most of the time) not need any special considerations for that makes it ideal for us. Sure, we could write web apps or something, but that's a different department.
I'm also not sure if it's still in the installer, but it used to ask you what you would be using unity for, and I don't remember most of the options, but one of them was "military simulations" or something like that, so they are aware of the possibility
Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#97My 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 think the biggest mistake you can make is shifting your mindset from making a game to making a game engine . No, you still want to be dead set on making your game , you just don't have the ready-made building blocks from an off-the-shelf engine, so you have to make your own as you go, and only as needed. Personally, when I was working on my little game, I found it helpful to call the endeavour—just like Noel Berry…
The way I phrase this to myself is ‘make the tool, don’t make the tool that makes the tool.’
Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#98My 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,…
> I've shipped 18 games, 4 of them AAA. I wrote the engines for most fo them.
Solo? Or part of a team?
Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#99Has 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.
Unity used to have a pretty good netcode implementation, but then they ripped it out in newer versions and still don't really have a good replacement for it
Re: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
#100[deleted]