3 ms·

As someone who's written engines, worked in bare bones do-everything-yourself frameworks, and used Unity, not everyone has the time or ability to sit down and c

by fiblye 7y ago

As someone who's written engines, worked in bare bones do-everything-yourself frameworks, and used Unity, not everyone has the time or ability to sit down and code almost everything from scratch. Some people have simple ideas that involve mostly gluing parts together and big engines are fine for that. Some can program everything if they want to, but they want a decent physics, rendering, and user input engine from the get-go so they can get to work on their ideas and not endless boilerplate code. Most indie gamedev projects I've seen die involve people who are primarily programmers who get stuck in framework hell. They're endlessly trying to build and tweak basic features for a basic framework, when any major engine has all of those features out of the box or with a 5 second package download. I've had to get myself out of the habit of doing everything myself, admitting defeat, and downloading existing packages. Oftentimes someone out there has something better than what I wanted to make and easily tweakable, saving weeks of time and still allowing me to give it my own touch. Even for a total amateur who won't use 1% of the features, Unity and Unreal have two huge things: support and a community. You can ask a question anywhere about anything and generally there's someone who can help and even give a precise solution. That's huge.

pjmlp 7y ago
That was one of the reasons (among others) that I never went beyond demoscene like stuff, always went too deep into engine stuff, and never produced anything really interesting as a game. Anyone that wants to do games should use a pre-made engine, if the game is at all interesting, people will play it, even if the technology sucks.
imtringued 7y ago
I like reinventing the wheel on the game logic side. The payoff for novel ideas is often pretty high. Not everything is a tiled side scrolling platformer or a top down RPG. However, with graphics it's the opposite for me. The amount of setup needed to even show a single triangle feels like a waste of time. You're tied to a single graphics API so you either have to write the code again and again for each API or you use an engine. The payoff is pretty low because spending hundreds of hours on a custom graphics engine doesn't make your game stand out unless you are very skilled. Of course this doesn't mean you shouldn't write your own graphics engine for fun and as a learning opportunity but if your goal is making a finished game then you should avoid falling into this trap.

by fiblye 7y ago

pjmlp 7y ago

That was one of the reasons (among others) that I never went beyond demoscene like stuff, always went too deep into engine stuff, and never produced anything really interesting as a game. Anyone that wants to do games should use a pre-made engine, if the game is at all interesting, people will play it, even if the technology sucks.

imtringued 7y ago

I like reinventing the wheel on the game logic side. The payoff for novel ideas is often pretty high. Not everything is a tiled side scrolling platformer or a top down RPG. However, with graphics it's the opposite for me. The amount of setup needed to even show a single triangle feels like a waste of time. You're tied to a single graphics API so you either have to write the code again and again for each API or you use an engine. The payoff is pretty low because spending hundreds of hours on a custom graphics engine doesn't make your game stand out unless you are very skilled. Of course this doesn't mean you shouldn't write your own graphics engine for fun and as a learning opportunity but if your goal is making a finished game then you should avoid falling into this trap.