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Custom Game Engines: A Small Study

390 points by panic 6y ago

badsectoracula 6y ago
It seems to be missing Dunia (Far Cry series) in the Ubisoft list. You could say that since it is based on an (early) CryEngine it isn't "custom" but it already contains engines that were forked off 3rd party engines (IW from Quake 3, Creation from NetImmerse, Source 2 from Quake 1, etc).
- dkersten 6y ago
  It definitely counts, it’s changed so much from cryengine 1 and, as you say, plenty of the other engines are based on earlier engines.
- theandrewbailey 6y ago
  Quake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quake_-_family_tree_2.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quake_-_family_tree_2.svg Cryengine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cryengine_Family_Tree_2016.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cryengine_Family_Tree_201...
phn 6y ago
Really interesting! The small studios (or one-man armies) are the ones using custom stuff because they have to do it all anyways, no biggie having to do a little leg work to import stuff. When you're a bigger studio, having to coordinate and support multiple teams with different workflows, the engine and the tools it provides play a much bigger role. The studios with such scale either build something that works for them, or use some existing one provided by others.
- s9w 6y ago
  I think the biggest reason for the custom code in the small teams is that they make 2D games. A 2D engine barely deserves the name and it's usually more hassle adapt to a 3rd party engine and its limitations than just write it yourself.
  - jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
    > A 2D engine barely deserves the name If you say so. The vast majority of programmers would have no clue where to start if you put them up to the task. A game engine is much more than a renderer, which is the only easier part in 2D versus 3D.
    - s9w 6y ago
      Sure there's a place for these engines. They abstract away graphics layers and bring convenience. But if you are a (semi-?) professional game dev, that's not a major hurdle. I have a toy game in play around in my free time and started with SDL like so many. You can create windows and draw bitmaps really easily. But sooner rather than later you discover limits (bugs, performance limitations, less than ideal APIs) and see that just writing OpenGL code yourself is actually easier and more flexible. Many people go down that road. edit: Concerning your edit about "more than a renderer": Yeah that other stuff is annoying and many still use SDL, SFML or whatever for that. See Factorio and many many others who do the rendering themselves and offload the other crap. I do that myself too.
      - onion2k 6y ago
        They abstract away graphics layers and bring convenience. And bring physics, input, asset loading, networking, systems, scripting, etc.
        s9w 6y ago
        That depends on the engine. The big guys do. But the pure 2D engines do not. And again the point I was trying to make was about graphics. Most if not all do not roll out their own code for input management, window creation, Networking and so on. But 2D graphics is relatively easy to DIY.
        onion2k 6y ago
        But the pure 2D engines do not. I've never seen a 2D game engine that doesn't give you at least graphics, physics, and input.
dmitriid 6y ago
I highly recommend Jonathan Blow's (Braid, The Witness) streams on custom programming language development (jai [1]) and game development: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCuoqzrsHlwv1YyPKLuMDUQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCuoqzrsHlwv1YyPKLuMDUQ In one of the videos he says that the big engines are trying to be everything for everybody, and there's value in developing a custom engine for your game's specific needs. [1] https://inductive.no/jai/ https://inductive.no/jai/
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  I think the other thing to note is that you aren't really making an engine just making the game. You might have some reused bits culled from one game to the next but that's not really "an engine" so to speak.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    I disagree on this one, for sure. That definition of “engine” is too narrow. There’s a tendency these days for people to think of “game engine” in terms of the big, general-purpose engines like Unity, Unreal, and Godot. However, by analogy, a car still has an engine even if that engine was purpose-built for the specific car and is never reused in other cars. It would be really weird to have to come up with a different name for the game engine for The Witness — what would you even call that, if not an “engine”? So, “engine” is going to refer to custom, never-reused engines in games until we get a better word for it.
    - meheleventyone 6y ago
      I'd call something an engine if it were reasonably general and could be repurposed. In the same way I can take the engine out of one car and plumb it into another. I'd also say an engine has to provide a relatively complete set of functionality otherwise you're building a library or framework. SDL as a classic example of that. I also think it's fine to think in terms of the game you're making between "game stuff" and "engine stuff" where the "engine stuff" is essentially things that could reasonably be repurposed. In the example of The Witness I'd not call it anything as it doesn't exist separately to it as far as I'm aware. I'd still understand someone who referred to it as the game engine though. The main point IMO is that making an engine implies more than just making the tech needed to power a game.
flafla2 6y ago
I noticed an omission on this list was Minecraft. Today, the game of course has thousands of engineers working on the various versions of the game due to its success. But in the beginning (and throughout Alpha/Beta and during the beginning years of its 1.0 development) it was built on a hacked-together Java LIBJDX 2.0-based engine. Here's the first video uploaded by Notch when he first embarked on a new "Cave game": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMpv5kZ9-rE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMpv5kZ9-rE (the original video is blocked in the US for some reason) An interesting side-effect of this technical decision was that the game was heavily moddable. Java byte code is relatively easy to decompile, and class files easily modularize the various components of the game. So installing a mod amounted to un-zipping the minecraft.jar file and replacing .class files with modded ones. In fact, this is still how modding works in the Java version of the game.
- pageandrew 6y ago
  I find it hard to believe that Minecraft today has thousands of engineers working on it.
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    Minecraft the Java game certainly doesn't but the whole IP probably has a lot more people working on it than people think. You have the Java version, Bedrock version, AR game and all the ancillary porting involved as well as all the backend services etc. powering Realms and the other bits and pieces. I think thousands of engineers is a massive exaggeration but it's certainly going to be a lot.
    - TotempaaltJ 6y ago
      Mojang, the developer of Minecraft, had 70 employees in 2016. It will definitely not have thousands by now. Maybe hundreds.
      - meheleventyone 6y ago
        Yes that's what I said.
jokoon 6y ago
Urho3d seems like it's a new engine, it seems like it's pretty good. Ogre3D is mentioned, but it's not as easy to use as it was, the doc seems poor, there are 2 versions of the engine (although it's a normal thing nowadays), so it seems the engine is dying.
bullen 6y ago
Cave Story is another one-person game, he made everything himself; art, music and code. With time, as technology peaks; more one-person engines will appear because you don't have to chase the next big thing all the time. I'm building a MMO from scratch since 20 years back, the most recent MMO that uses my server is free-to-play this weekend: https://store.steampowered.com/app/486310/Meadow/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/486310/Meadow/ The source for the backend is here: https://github.com/tinspin/fuse https://github.com/tinspin/fuse You can call it a one-man MMO backend. I'm going to release a MVP for the C++ 3D MMO client in about a month hopefully, here is a tech demo for it: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=579711216639635462 http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=579711216639635462
- aaron-lebo 6y ago
  This is really beautiful work. Thanks for dedicating yourself to that. Yall, it's $2. Support the man.
  - aaron-lebo 6y ago
    I know that "rules" say don't complain about downvotes, but man, I'm confused when people have downvoted me for complimenting someone's work and suggesting that you should support them. I stated it was $2 so that people who hadn't bothered checking out the Steam page would be aware of that, bu whatever. @dang, I really don't think HN was intended to work like that. I watched a few minutes ago as someone went through my comments and over 30 seconds it went -2, -2, -2, which even makes me wonder if people have multiple accounts that they abuse for that. Has anyone else experienced that? Sorry for the meta, I just don't get that behavior. Kind of ugly. edit: so yeah, same thing on this comment. Bam, -2. I dunno what spiteful game someone is playing, but it's silly.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - ryandrake 6y ago
      People will downvote anything here. From facts to personal experience stories to complements, there are just people out there who downvote everything. And they'll get their friends to brigade too, just for the lulz. It's best not to worry about it, internalize it, or complain about it. They're just fake internet points after all.
yellowapple 6y ago
One surprising omission here was Paradox, which uses its own in-house engine for (AFAICT) all of its grand strategy games (though this seems to apply only to their own studio(s); Cities: Skylines, for example, is Unity-based, and I believe Surviving Mars derives from whatever engine Haemimont uses for its Tropico games). TaleWorlds is another studio that wrote its own engine for Mount & Blade (reused later for M&B Warband and its expansions), and more recently developed a new engine from scratch for the recently-released (and 8 years awaited) Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord. The older M&B games were definitely niche, but Bannerlord's definitely notable going by the numbers (it's currently in the Top 10 games by concurrent players per steamcharts.com, though that seems to be tapering off now that the novelty's wearing off a bit; it also broke Steam's payment processing within minutes after launch). Early Access, but still an interesting example.
- namelosw 6y ago
  Also, the original Mount & Blade was originally a hobby project developed by a Turkish couple.
- jandrese 6y ago
  Note however that Paradox's strategy engines are notoriously buggy.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
    Fair, but I can think of few (if any) engines that are a whole lot better on that particular metric.
- Kinrany 6y ago
  Did they really develop a new engine? This is an interesting case then: Bannerlord feels like a really polished Warband. The opposite seems way more common: a sequel that tries to be different but noticeably uses the same tech under the hood.
  - yellowapple 6y ago
davedx 6y ago
> It would be really nice to know how many engineers are working on the engine division for each company, I'm sure there would be some big surprises, probably by the low number of engineers working in the engine and tools! When I worked for Free Radical Design we had two big AAA games in development both using the FRD in-house custom game engine. I'd say the engineer split was something like 30:30:30 between engine and the two games, with another split between engine programming and tool programming (though there was some cross over there, for example one of the guys on the game team I was on worked on the game editor). The engine was really impressive - it was cross platform and ran on *Nix, Windows, XBox 360 and PS3. The engine guys did an amazing job on it.
speps 6y ago
Regarding A Plague Tale, I used to work at Asobo Studio on the Engine/Tools team. That was during the Toy Story 3 / Disney Pixar Heroes period. The in-house engine is called Zouna and is very good. However, the piece of software that was the most interesting to me is their in house level editor called PAWAP (can't remember what the acronym meant) . It's a 20+ years old C++ codebase dating back to Kalisto (where most of the founders of Asobo used to work), of course modernised over time. I changed code that was written before C++98 was standardised! The Engine team is amazing there and it shows in the games.
- benjaminsuch 6y ago
  The graphics of A Plague Tale are astounding. Great job from all of them.
baud147258 6y ago
Regarding the Fox Engine of Konami, in addition to the Pro Evolution Soccer games, it was also used for Metal Gear Solid V
ashtonkem 6y ago
In the medium sized category, Valve is the obvious odd child. They have a small number of employees, but they also famously make Steam. This certainly requires a large amount of engineering effort, but also brings in literal billions in cash. They could almost certainly afford to outsource the creation of a custom game engine, since they have the cash flow and it’s probably not as core an activity as maintaining Steam. But it could also be in house. I don’t have a feel for how many engineers it takes to make a game engine.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  A game engine is really a project that scales really well with the size of the team. There are a monumental number of things you could put into one so they will swallow any number of engineers you throw at them. For comparisons you have PICO-8 which is an intentionally super limited but fully integrated game engine made by one person. Then you have Unity which is a very featureful engine, ported to every commercial platform with a vast toolset and side offerings which arguably has lost sight of a bunch of the game engine part of things because they have the capability to spin so many plates and a business incentive to drive revenue by getting people to sign up to extra services.
- deleted 6y ago
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- worble 6y ago
  Well, before Steam was the behemoth it is today, all they had was the Source engine. Back when it first came out, everyone I know _hated_ Steam, but you had to install it to play Half Life 2 with it's new graphics, physics and facial animations. And now with Valve pushing VR strongly, I imagine we're going to see the same thing. You want to play Half-Life Alyx with the all new Source engine built for VR? You gotta buy our headsets and use Steam VR home for the best experience! For Valve, having the Source engine in-house always gives them that extra bargaining chip when they want to push something new.
  - pugworthy 6y ago
    > all they had was the Source engine GoldSrc actually - the HL1 engine. Which was built off a heavily modified Quake engine. > Back when it first came out, everyone I know _hated_ Steam That was 16 years ago and 90 million users ago. Yes it was shaky and had issues back then (I was a very early account signup), but again a long time ago. > You want to play Half-Life Alyx with the all new Source engine built for VR? You gotta buy our headsets and use Steam VR home for the best experience! No. You don't need their hardware. I'm using HP WMR without issue and have completed HL: Alyx. Yes, Valve's controllers are top notch, but you don't have to use them. And SteamVR is just part of Steam, and if you want to play any Valve game, you have to use Steam. Speaking of HP. HP and Valve have been apparently working on some new things together, so I would imagine there are going to be more/better VR options down the line.
nsomaru 6y ago
Came here to mention Sapiens, an indie written from scratch by this guy named Dave, from NZ. Dave is great and goes through his development process of the custom Lua engine he wrote for his game engine, the AI, as well as design decions. Follow him here: https://www.youtube.com/user/majiDave https://www.youtube.com/user/majiDave
sibane 6y ago
Something that could probably be added is that many people and studios still use third-party engines for prototyping new projects.
koonsolo 6y ago
I'm working on my own 'no-code' game creation tool for almost 10 years now. I had to create my own game engine because it had to be 100% data driven, and none of the existing ones really fitted my need. The cool thing about a data driven engine is that there is no building and restarting phase. You just edit everything inside the running game. You can check it out at https://rpgplayground.com https://rpgplayground.com .
- swalsh 6y ago
  This is awesome, it reminds me of RPG Maker 2000. Which was a staple of my childhood. I can't describe how fond I am of the memories I have with that tool.
- chrismaltby 6y ago
  Looks great, I'm working on a similar kind of project specifically for making Game Boy games. https://www.gbstudio.dev/ https://www.gbstudio.dev/ I'll definitely have a look at your project for some ideas.
  - Andrex 6y ago
    Just want to say I love your project, and shout loudly about it to whoever will listen. :P It's very exciting! Thank you for your work.
  - koonsolo 6y ago
    Yeah I know your project, it's really great! I think it was big news here on hn. Love how clean and simple you keep both your project and website.
  - lostgame 6y ago
    This is one of the coolest projects I’ve ever seen. I’d love to see jo-engine (Sega Saturn) evolve into something like this.
- nougatbyte 6y ago
  I've stumbled across your page some time ago and forgot to bookmarket it, thank you for sharing it. Always wanted to build something like the RPG Maker for the web myself, but never found the time to do it. Your product looks wonderful and I'm a bit jealous.
billfruit 6y ago
A couple rather remarkable engines not listed: -Whatever isometric games like AOE2DE are using and the custom engine used in Brigador. Brigador, esp, I read that the developers found that none of existing engines could satisfy their vision, so then spent a few years building their own. Finally it turned out good, the game though made by a very small team, looks spectacular, and runs well even on low end hardware. -Whatever Avalanche Studio's are using for their games like Just Cause, Renegade Ops, and Mad Max. They graphics seems not only look good, but very performant on medium to low end PCs.
- som33 6y ago
  They use their own engine called the APEX engine. "Just Cause 2 was announced in January 2008. Powered by the Apex Engine 2.0"
- whateveracct 6y ago
  Never heard of Brigador but it looks beautiful. Seems to be a pseudo-3D game. Lots of 2D assets, an isometric perspective, and modern graphics on top (I just saw in a Steam forum post that they light the sprites dynamically)
- billfruit 6y ago
  Also whatever Sumo Digital uses for their games like Sonic Allstars Racing Transformed.It had such lush water effects, but again no problem rendering it smoothly on low end hardware.
bregma 6y ago
The general rule for small (single-developer or maybe teams of single digits) studios is "make games, not engines". Turns out people don't play engines, they play games. Just finishing making a game is hard enough and most don't make it that far. If you have to finish your engine before you start the remaining 90% of game development, well, keep your day job.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  > Turns out people don't play engines, they play games is it 100% true though ? I remember a lot of hours spent on Garry's Mod with my friend group as a teen, and that's borderline closer to a game engine than to a game
  - klodolph 6y ago
    Garry’s Mod uses a well-known existing engine, the Source engine.
- klodolph 6y ago
  That’s a reasonable general rule but it’s too easy to remember the short version “make games, not engines” and forget the underlying advice, which is more subtle. Making a game engine first and then making a game second is a fools errand, even if your goal is to make the game engine. However, you can make the engine in parallel with the game. Making a purpose-built engine in parallel with a game can be very reasonable. Having made a number of games with and without off-the-shelf engines, whether or not a custom engine makes sense depends heavily on the specifics of your team and the game you are making.
  - midnightclubbed 6y ago
    This is a great point and often forgotten at game studios. Without a game driving the engine feature set you will almost certainly end up with an engine design that tries to do 'everything' because your target is Unreal/Unity.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
klodolph 6y ago
Unity, Unreal, Godot, Game Maker etc are all so popular these days it’s easy to lose sight of how you can make a game with a “custom engine”. “Make games, not engines” is fine advice in general but you can make an engine for your specific game without making that engine look like Unity. You don’t need a sophisticated custom level editor, you can just use something off the shelf like Tiled. You don’t need an extension language (like C# or Lua), you can just do the whole engine + game in one project, with one language. You might also have a valuable mental toolkit that is squandered when using an existing engine. I can’t count all the times I’ve said, “I know how to implement that, but not in Unity.” My mental model of how objects are drawn to the screen consists entirely of buffers and shader program invocations. There are also plenty of games that just don’t benefit from some of the core features of engines, like physics, and need to roll their own anyway. Some games have fairly custom needs and aren’t a good match for existing engines (like No Man’s Sky or Minecraft) and some games (especially 2D games) have very simple needs and an engine doesn’t provide as much of an edge over something like a framework (e.g. MonoGame) or platform abstraction library (e.g. SDL). Or in short, “custom engine” does not automatically mean “half-baked alternative to Unity”. Just how it’s totally fine to make your next web app backend without using a high-level framework, and it’s totally fine to make your next frontend without React. If anything, it’s easier than ever to make a frontend without React, just like it’s easier than ever to make a game without Unity.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  > “Make games, not engines” is fine advice in general but you can make an engine for your specific game without making that engine look like Unity. You don’t need a sophisticated custom level editor, you can just use something off the shelf like Tiled. You don’t need an extension language (like C# or Lua), you can just do the whole engine + game in one project, with one language. Note that the original meaning behind "Make games, not engines" was exactly that (IIRC when it was originally written in a blog post that somehow became popular, Unity was still a MacOS-only engine and other engines were prohibitively expensive to indies), not that you should avoid making engines. Basically it was about focusing on making the game and have your engine implement just the features your game needs, not the feature some theoretical game might need in the future. It was an advice meant warn against scope creep. Also it was directed towards people who actually wanted to make games with their engines and it wasn't directed towards people who just wanted to focus on the tech side (even though the advice was still to have some sort of demo game to drive things). Somehow over the years people started using the phrase as if it meant "stick with making games, do not bother making engines".
gldev3 6y ago
What a nice little gist, just what i needed to get motivated over the weekend.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
One I didn't see on here—probably because they're not particularly well known—is the custom engine built by Coilworks for their game, Cloudbuilt[1]. I find this super impressive, because (A) Coilworks was tiny, and (B) Cloudbuilt is a fully 3D, polygonal game. While the simple graphics likely help, Super Cloudbuilt performs well, with great frame pacing and minimal input latency—not something I can say about a lot of more mainstream games on traditional engines. And Super Cloudbuilt is a lot of fun! --- [1] https://www.double11.com/games/supercloudbuilt/ https://www.double11.com/games/supercloudbuilt/
midnightclubbed 6y ago
Many of these game 'engines' are not engines at all in the Unreal/Unity sense of things. More a collection of libraries and code that are used to implement a game. For many games this is just fine (and sometimes a better fit than a monolithic engine). If you can't take a read-only copy of the engine and implement a game on top of that then you don't have an engine. Marketing will still want you to name the 'engine' though! Back in the earlier days of Unreal there was an industry joke that Unreal was great if you were making a single player third person space marine game on Xbox or PC. Unreal has come a very long way since then and is a truly wonderful achievement but it took a huge amount of time, resources and skill to get it to where it is now.
- clarry 6y ago
  > If you can't take a read-only copy of the engine and implement a game on top of that then you don't have an engine. Marketing will still want you to name the 'engine' though! I guess id Tech 1 -- which they licensed to many developers -- was not an engine then? I don't think that's a useful definition. > Back in the earlier days of Unreal there was an industry joke that Unreal was great if you were making a single player third person space marine game on Xbox or PC. Did Unreal really fall that far after the glory days of Unreal, Unreal Tournament '99, Deus Ex, Clive Barker's Undying..? Wow. The Xbox generation of games really ruined so many things.
- lfowles 6y ago
  > Back in the earlier days of Unreal there was an industry joke that Unreal was great if you were making a single player third person space marine game on Xbox or PC Heh! In the process of implementing custom movement similar to F-Zero, I'd have to say it's still heavily optimized towards character based games.
Laremere 6y ago
As with all things, there's a balance and a place for technical trade offs to be made. The first entry on the list, Activision/Blizzard, built Hearthstone in Unity. A better case study would look at what games are successful, and then look at what engines they use. One way to look at things, is who in recent years won the (imo) biggest indie game award, the Seumas McNally Grand Prize: - A Short Hike: Unity - Return of the Obra Dinn: Unity - Night in the Woods: Unity - Quadrilateral Cowboy: id Tech 4 - Her Story: Unity - Outer Wilds: Unity - Papers, Please: custom using OpenFL/Haxe - Cart Life: Adventure Game Studio I admittedly started looking because I knew Obra Din was Unity, so there's some bias in category selection. That brings us to 2013. That 5/8 Unity, and 7/8 using an engine. The remaining 1/8 (Papers, Please) was developed by Lukas Pope, who later made Return of the Obra Dinn in Unity. This is a list chosen by game developers, but I would think that would skew the list towards impressive custom things. I do agree with the spirit of the post: You don't have to use an engine. Nothing about a game engine is magical. There's lots of success stories on both sides.
- joveian 6y ago
  I am disabled and have played a bunch of games (DRM-free only, via GOG or Humble Bundle) and I can confirm that Unity games are extremely common, including on tiny 2d games, visual novels, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if over 5 of 8 games in the past decade (or at least the last 8 years) used Unity. Interestingly, from the Wikipedia page it seems that Unity was a result of "our game didn't do well but we made awesome tools". They now have 2000+ employees according to Wikipedia. The employee numbers on some of these companies is misleading. Nintendo does not just make video games, but the employee count covers everyone. CD Projekt employee count includes GOG and is somehow mostly the developer side, but GOG still has 172 employees (but not a single employee over 50, and only 2 in all of CD Projekt :/, also for anyone else wondering while I'm looking at the stats, GOG is a bit under and the rest of CD Projekt a bit over 25% women). It looks like Valve does both development and Steam with 360ish employees. Also publishers often do quite a bit of QA and such for games they publish (even if it often doesn't seem like it :/), so comparing publishers with studios that have outside publishers is also not getting the full picture. Also worth noting the open source RenPy that a number of visual novels use.
tryauuum 6y ago
can I recommend «Autumn Night 3D Shooter» here? It's a short 3d shooter with custom engine that was made with love. Author boasts about it being 100% software-renderer (in other words, it doesn't use GPU acceleration)
pengaru 6y ago
I've been dabbling a bit in game development in recent years and have so far taken the approach of just building small composable libraries or headers encompassing units of functionality as needed. This of course meant progress was rather slow-going early on, having no prior experience with things like 3D rendering or the related math, spatial indexes/collision detection, the list goes on... I figured by creating everything as needed I would at least be getting a better understanding of what's going on and how everything comes together, plus owning all of the code doesn't hurt. Last weekend I successfully participated in a 24hr irc art contest by submitting a small game using some of these components, and I'm happy to say it's a whole lot easier for me to slap something simple together today with this pile of parts than it was a couple years ago. I made a Show HN about the 24hr contest submission since it's all GPL and thought some HNers might enjoy poking at it, but it didn't seem to get any notice. This was the post if interested https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22940287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22940287
aeturnum 6y ago
Adding to the list of small, single-developer-multi-year 2d games: Starsector[1]. It's a modern descendant of a whole set of top down shooters (I found it looking for a modern Escape Velocity, but it's quite different). The developer is very active and the modding community is huge - lots of total conversions and expansions have been created by the community. [1] https://fractalsoftworks.com/ https://fractalsoftworks.com/
- adrianpike 6y ago
  Did you ever find a good modern Escape Velocity? I lost a lot of time to that game back in the day, and it's still one my favorites of all time.
  - aeturnum 6y ago
    The answer I've found the most often is Endless Sky[1]. It's open source and has the look. I've installed it and messed about before, but never gotten enough into it to feel like it's a worthy successor (for me). Of course, EV Nova was released for Windows and still runs fine. I'll start a new campaign every few years. Not sure if you can still purchase it legally tho - the company has gone under[2]. Also - if you enjoy EV, I highly recommend checking out Subspace! It's not the same, exactly, but it scratches a lot of the same itches for me. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/404410/Endless_Sky/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/404410/Endless_Sky/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosia_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosia_Software
joveian 6y ago
I was curios about Falcom since they have such consistently good games. I couldn't find a detailed lists but it sounds like most Falcom games (Including recent Ys games) use their own custom engine called the "Yamaneko Engine". Tokyo Xanadu and Cold Steel I and II (not sure about later ones) use Sony's PhyreEngine. They had 62 employees in 2019 according to Wikipedia.
CM30 6y ago
Nice list! Interesting to see the breakdown of companies and which engines they use/which ones use completely custom ones and which use modified versions of stuff like Unity and Unreal engine. That said, it might be interesting to look at companies that changed from using custom engines to stuff like Unity/Unreal at some point, or perhaps the other way around. I remember Rare originally building most of their game engines inhouse at one point, but their Xbox 360/Xbox One era games seem to have changed that. It's also interesting to note that there are also quite a few custom game engines being made for various fan game development scenes too, as well as off the shelf ones specifically made for games based on that series. Or that the same 'build games not engines' and 'unless everything is custom it's not worth it' debates exist there too. Either way, some of the notable ones there include: - Hello Engine, which was basically a hybrid of various 2D Mario titles in a way that made it very easy to use as a level editor. Has roughly the same reputation as Unity does on Steam because of that, with at least one game basically marketing itself as a parody of it as a result. - Gatete Engine, with a fairly similar featureset, but a more modern coding style - Super Mario Bros X, a level editor created by the guy behind Terraria, which has since ended up decompiled and remade in a different programming language by fans, with various forks made based on that. There are also obviously a ton of individuals and small groups building their own engines for individual games in that community too. Finally, the whole 'make games not engines' thing doesn't have to refer to the entire engine. No, it can be equally easy to get distracted by the possibility of adding extra features to an existing one too.
wxkn 6y ago
Game engines are super interesting. The variety of different things happening in the program, the audio/visual aspect, the real-time nature of the application. It's exciting to work on. It just feels like there is a software machine chugging forward. A few years ago I made a mostly crappy 2D arcade game with a custom engine ("Fractus" on Steam). It basically started as a way to learn graphics tech and try out some visualization ideas. Slowly it turned into a real project. For a long time the journey of creating an engine was the main thing. Unfortunately, I think this shows in the final game quality... still working on that. I remember reading a post about having a "forever project". It's that piece of software that you keep going back to hack on because it feels good. I find a graphics engine to be a good choice for this. If you have an idea/design/plan for a game, you probably shouldn't make your own engine without a compelling reason. But what if you don't really have an idea, yet still want to get into the programming side of games? Try working on a toy engine!
knackfuss 6y ago
I am making a custom c++ 3D game engine using openGL right now and it's a massive undertaking. I have a lot of respect for folks like Jonathan Blow who manages to be an incredible game designer while also being a super programmer. In my case, i just decided to give it a try because if i ever watch an engine/game maker software tutorial again i will most likely throw up.The amount of trivia knowledge you need to have to make something in those engines is huge and usually non transferible between them. Also if you want to make sure you will provide the absolute best experience possible for your players, you need to have control of the low level stuff. I may be wrong but i don't think Unity allows you that kind of control. Two examples are Subnautica and Firewatch, while being excelent games in their own way, fail miserably in loading up the game assets in time after player spawn (subnautica mostly) and are filled with visual artifacts and texture problems (both games) while The Witness does not give you even the smallest hickup whatsoever.
- DeathArrow 6y ago
  >Also if you want to make sure you will provide the absolute best experience possible for your players, you need to have control of the low level stuff. I disagree with that. Sometimes you need, sometimes you don't. >I may be wrong but i don't think Unity allows you that kind of control. It allows you to use your own level stuff, like your own custom renderer, or your own physics engines. Some studios releasing AAA games do that, because they have the resources.

390 points by panic 6y ago

It seems to be missing Dunia (Far Cry series) in the Ubisoft list. You could say that since it is based on an (early) CryEngine it isn't "custom" but it already contains engines that were forked off 3rd party engines (IW from Quake 3, Creation from NetImmerse, Source 2 from Quake 1, etc).

dkersten 6y ago
It definitely counts, it’s changed so much from cryengine 1 and, as you say, plenty of the other engines are based on earlier engines.
theandrewbailey 6y ago
Quake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quake_-_family_tree_2.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Quake_-_family_tree_2.svg Cryengine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cryengine_Family_Tree_2016.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cryengine_Family_Tree_201...

phn 6y ago

Really interesting! The small studios (or one-man armies) are the ones using custom stuff because they have to do it all anyways, no biggie having to do a little leg work to import stuff. When you're a bigger studio, having to coordinate and support multiple teams with different workflows, the engine and the tools it provides play a much bigger role. The studios with such scale either build something that works for them, or use some existing one provided by others.

s9w 6y ago
I think the biggest reason for the custom code in the small teams is that they make 2D games. A 2D engine barely deserves the name and it's usually more hassle adapt to a 3rd party engine and its limitations than just write it yourself.
- jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
  > A 2D engine barely deserves the name If you say so. The vast majority of programmers would have no clue where to start if you put them up to the task. A game engine is much more than a renderer, which is the only easier part in 2D versus 3D.
  - s9w 6y ago
    Sure there's a place for these engines. They abstract away graphics layers and bring convenience. But if you are a (semi-?) professional game dev, that's not a major hurdle. I have a toy game in play around in my free time and started with SDL like so many. You can create windows and draw bitmaps really easily. But sooner rather than later you discover limits (bugs, performance limitations, less than ideal APIs) and see that just writing OpenGL code yourself is actually easier and more flexible. Many people go down that road. edit: Concerning your edit about "more than a renderer": Yeah that other stuff is annoying and many still use SDL, SFML or whatever for that. See Factorio and many many others who do the rendering themselves and offload the other crap. I do that myself too.
    - onion2k 6y ago
      They abstract away graphics layers and bring convenience. And bring physics, input, asset loading, networking, systems, scripting, etc.
      - s9w 6y ago
        That depends on the engine. The big guys do. But the pure 2D engines do not. And again the point I was trying to make was about graphics. Most if not all do not roll out their own code for input management, window creation, Networking and so on. But 2D graphics is relatively easy to DIY.
        onion2k 6y ago
        But the pure 2D engines do not. I've never seen a 2D game engine that doesn't give you at least graphics, physics, and input.

dmitriid 6y ago

I highly recommend Jonathan Blow's (Braid, The Witness) streams on custom programming language development (jai [1]) and game development: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCuoqzrsHlwv1YyPKLuMDUQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCuoqzrsHlwv1YyPKLuMDUQ In one of the videos he says that the big engines are trying to be everything for everybody, and there's value in developing a custom engine for your game's specific needs. [1] https://inductive.no/jai/ https://inductive.no/jai/

meheleventyone 6y ago
I think the other thing to note is that you aren't really making an engine just making the game. You might have some reused bits culled from one game to the next but that's not really "an engine" so to speak.
- klodolph 6y ago
  I disagree on this one, for sure. That definition of “engine” is too narrow. There’s a tendency these days for people to think of “game engine” in terms of the big, general-purpose engines like Unity, Unreal, and Godot. However, by analogy, a car still has an engine even if that engine was purpose-built for the specific car and is never reused in other cars. It would be really weird to have to come up with a different name for the game engine for The Witness — what would you even call that, if not an “engine”? So, “engine” is going to refer to custom, never-reused engines in games until we get a better word for it.
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    I'd call something an engine if it were reasonably general and could be repurposed. In the same way I can take the engine out of one car and plumb it into another. I'd also say an engine has to provide a relatively complete set of functionality otherwise you're building a library or framework. SDL as a classic example of that. I also think it's fine to think in terms of the game you're making between "game stuff" and "engine stuff" where the "engine stuff" is essentially things that could reasonably be repurposed. In the example of The Witness I'd not call it anything as it doesn't exist separately to it as far as I'm aware. I'd still understand someone who referred to it as the game engine though. The main point IMO is that making an engine implies more than just making the tech needed to power a game.

flafla2 6y ago

I noticed an omission on this list was Minecraft. Today, the game of course has thousands of engineers working on the various versions of the game due to its success. But in the beginning (and throughout Alpha/Beta and during the beginning years of its 1.0 development) it was built on a hacked-together Java LIBJDX 2.0-based engine. Here's the first video uploaded by Notch when he first embarked on a new "Cave game": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMpv5kZ9-rE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMpv5kZ9-rE (the original video is blocked in the US for some reason) An interesting side-effect of this technical decision was that the game was heavily moddable. Java byte code is relatively easy to decompile, and class files easily modularize the various components of the game. So installing a mod amounted to un-zipping the minecraft.jar file and replacing .class files with modded ones. In fact, this is still how modding works in the Java version of the game.

pageandrew 6y ago
I find it hard to believe that Minecraft today has thousands of engineers working on it.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  Minecraft the Java game certainly doesn't but the whole IP probably has a lot more people working on it than people think. You have the Java version, Bedrock version, AR game and all the ancillary porting involved as well as all the backend services etc. powering Realms and the other bits and pieces. I think thousands of engineers is a massive exaggeration but it's certainly going to be a lot.
  - TotempaaltJ 6y ago
    Mojang, the developer of Minecraft, had 70 employees in 2016. It will definitely not have thousands by now. Maybe hundreds.
    - meheleventyone 6y ago
      Yes that's what I said.

jokoon 6y ago

Urho3d seems like it's a new engine, it seems like it's pretty good. Ogre3D is mentioned, but it's not as easy to use as it was, the doc seems poor, there are 2 versions of the engine (although it's a normal thing nowadays), so it seems the engine is dying.

bullen 6y ago

Cave Story is another one-person game, he made everything himself; art, music and code. With time, as technology peaks; more one-person engines will appear because you don't have to chase the next big thing all the time. I'm building a MMO from scratch since 20 years back, the most recent MMO that uses my server is free-to-play this weekend: https://store.steampowered.com/app/486310/Meadow/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/486310/Meadow/ The source for the backend is here: https://github.com/tinspin/fuse https://github.com/tinspin/fuse You can call it a one-man MMO backend. I'm going to release a MVP for the C++ 3D MMO client in about a month hopefully, here is a tech demo for it: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=579711216639635462 http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=579711216639635462

aaron-lebo 6y ago
This is really beautiful work. Thanks for dedicating yourself to that. Yall, it's $2. Support the man.
- aaron-lebo 6y ago
  I know that "rules" say don't complain about downvotes, but man, I'm confused when people have downvoted me for complimenting someone's work and suggesting that you should support them. I stated it was $2 so that people who hadn't bothered checking out the Steam page would be aware of that, bu whatever. @dang, I really don't think HN was intended to work like that. I watched a few minutes ago as someone went through my comments and over 30 seconds it went -2, -2, -2, which even makes me wonder if people have multiple accounts that they abuse for that. Has anyone else experienced that? Sorry for the meta, I just don't get that behavior. Kind of ugly. edit: so yeah, same thing on this comment. Bam, -2. I dunno what spiteful game someone is playing, but it's silly.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    People will downvote anything here. From facts to personal experience stories to complements, there are just people out there who downvote everything. And they'll get their friends to brigade too, just for the lulz. It's best not to worry about it, internalize it, or complain about it. They're just fake internet points after all.

yellowapple 6y ago

One surprising omission here was Paradox, which uses its own in-house engine for (AFAICT) all of its grand strategy games (though this seems to apply only to their own studio(s); Cities: Skylines, for example, is Unity-based, and I believe Surviving Mars derives from whatever engine Haemimont uses for its Tropico games). TaleWorlds is another studio that wrote its own engine for Mount & Blade (reused later for M&B Warband and its expansions), and more recently developed a new engine from scratch for the recently-released (and 8 years awaited) Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord. The older M&B games were definitely niche, but Bannerlord's definitely notable going by the numbers (it's currently in the Top 10 games by concurrent players per steamcharts.com, though that seems to be tapering off now that the novelty's wearing off a bit; it also broke Steam's payment processing within minutes after launch). Early Access, but still an interesting example.

namelosw 6y ago
Also, the original Mount & Blade was originally a hobby project developed by a Turkish couple.
jandrese 6y ago
Note however that Paradox's strategy engines are notoriously buggy.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  Fair, but I can think of few (if any) engines that are a whole lot better on that particular metric.
Kinrany 6y ago
Did they really develop a new engine? This is an interesting case then: Bannerlord feels like a really polished Warband. The opposite seems way more common: a sequel that tries to be different but noticeably uses the same tech under the hood.
- yellowapple 6y ago

davedx 6y ago

> It would be really nice to know how many engineers are working on the engine division for each company, I'm sure there would be some big surprises, probably by the low number of engineers working in the engine and tools! When I worked for Free Radical Design we had two big AAA games in development both using the FRD in-house custom game engine. I'd say the engineer split was something like 30:30:30 between engine and the two games, with another split between engine programming and tool programming (though there was some cross over there, for example one of the guys on the game team I was on worked on the game editor). The engine was really impressive - it was cross platform and ran on *Nix, Windows, XBox 360 and PS3. The engine guys did an amazing job on it.

speps 6y ago

Regarding A Plague Tale, I used to work at Asobo Studio on the Engine/Tools team. That was during the Toy Story 3 / Disney Pixar Heroes period. The in-house engine is called Zouna and is very good. However, the piece of software that was the most interesting to me is their in house level editor called PAWAP (can't remember what the acronym meant) . It's a 20+ years old C++ codebase dating back to Kalisto (where most of the founders of Asobo used to work), of course modernised over time. I changed code that was written before C++98 was standardised! The Engine team is amazing there and it shows in the games.

benjaminsuch 6y ago
The graphics of A Plague Tale are astounding. Great job from all of them.

baud147258 6y ago

Regarding the Fox Engine of Konami, in addition to the Pro Evolution Soccer games, it was also used for Metal Gear Solid V

ashtonkem 6y ago

In the medium sized category, Valve is the obvious odd child. They have a small number of employees, but they also famously make Steam. This certainly requires a large amount of engineering effort, but also brings in literal billions in cash. They could almost certainly afford to outsource the creation of a custom game engine, since they have the cash flow and it’s probably not as core an activity as maintaining Steam. But it could also be in house. I don’t have a feel for how many engineers it takes to make a game engine.

meheleventyone 6y ago
A game engine is really a project that scales really well with the size of the team. There are a monumental number of things you could put into one so they will swallow any number of engineers you throw at them. For comparisons you have PICO-8 which is an intentionally super limited but fully integrated game engine made by one person. Then you have Unity which is a very featureful engine, ported to every commercial platform with a vast toolset and side offerings which arguably has lost sight of a bunch of the game engine part of things because they have the capability to spin so many plates and a business incentive to drive revenue by getting people to sign up to extra services.
deleted 6y ago
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worble 6y ago
Well, before Steam was the behemoth it is today, all they had was the Source engine. Back when it first came out, everyone I know _hated_ Steam, but you had to install it to play Half Life 2 with it's new graphics, physics and facial animations. And now with Valve pushing VR strongly, I imagine we're going to see the same thing. You want to play Half-Life Alyx with the all new Source engine built for VR? You gotta buy our headsets and use Steam VR home for the best experience! For Valve, having the Source engine in-house always gives them that extra bargaining chip when they want to push something new.
- pugworthy 6y ago
  > all they had was the Source engine GoldSrc actually - the HL1 engine. Which was built off a heavily modified Quake engine. > Back when it first came out, everyone I know _hated_ Steam That was 16 years ago and 90 million users ago. Yes it was shaky and had issues back then (I was a very early account signup), but again a long time ago. > You want to play Half-Life Alyx with the all new Source engine built for VR? You gotta buy our headsets and use Steam VR home for the best experience! No. You don't need their hardware. I'm using HP WMR without issue and have completed HL: Alyx. Yes, Valve's controllers are top notch, but you don't have to use them. And SteamVR is just part of Steam, and if you want to play any Valve game, you have to use Steam. Speaking of HP. HP and Valve have been apparently working on some new things together, so I would imagine there are going to be more/better VR options down the line.

nsomaru 6y ago

Came here to mention Sapiens, an indie written from scratch by this guy named Dave, from NZ. Dave is great and goes through his development process of the custom Lua engine he wrote for his game engine, the AI, as well as design decions. Follow him here: https://www.youtube.com/user/majiDave https://www.youtube.com/user/majiDave

sibane 6y ago

Something that could probably be added is that many people and studios still use third-party engines for prototyping new projects.

koonsolo 6y ago

I'm working on my own 'no-code' game creation tool for almost 10 years now. I had to create my own game engine because it had to be 100% data driven, and none of the existing ones really fitted my need. The cool thing about a data driven engine is that there is no building and restarting phase. You just edit everything inside the running game. You can check it out at https://rpgplayground.com https://rpgplayground.com .

swalsh 6y ago
This is awesome, it reminds me of RPG Maker 2000. Which was a staple of my childhood. I can't describe how fond I am of the memories I have with that tool.
chrismaltby 6y ago
Looks great, I'm working on a similar kind of project specifically for making Game Boy games. https://www.gbstudio.dev/ https://www.gbstudio.dev/ I'll definitely have a look at your project for some ideas.
- Andrex 6y ago
  Just want to say I love your project, and shout loudly about it to whoever will listen. :P It's very exciting! Thank you for your work.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  Yeah I know your project, it's really great! I think it was big news here on hn. Love how clean and simple you keep both your project and website.
- lostgame 6y ago
  This is one of the coolest projects I’ve ever seen. I’d love to see jo-engine (Sega Saturn) evolve into something like this.
nougatbyte 6y ago
I've stumbled across your page some time ago and forgot to bookmarket it, thank you for sharing it. Always wanted to build something like the RPG Maker for the web myself, but never found the time to do it. Your product looks wonderful and I'm a bit jealous.

billfruit 6y ago

A couple rather remarkable engines not listed: -Whatever isometric games like AOE2DE are using and the custom engine used in Brigador. Brigador, esp, I read that the developers found that none of existing engines could satisfy their vision, so then spent a few years building their own. Finally it turned out good, the game though made by a very small team, looks spectacular, and runs well even on low end hardware. -Whatever Avalanche Studio's are using for their games like Just Cause, Renegade Ops, and Mad Max. They graphics seems not only look good, but very performant on medium to low end PCs.

som33 6y ago
They use their own engine called the APEX engine. "Just Cause 2 was announced in January 2008. Powered by the Apex Engine 2.0"
whateveracct 6y ago
Never heard of Brigador but it looks beautiful. Seems to be a pseudo-3D game. Lots of 2D assets, an isometric perspective, and modern graphics on top (I just saw in a Steam forum post that they light the sprites dynamically)
billfruit 6y ago
Also whatever Sumo Digital uses for their games like Sonic Allstars Racing Transformed.It had such lush water effects, but again no problem rendering it smoothly on low end hardware.

bregma 6y ago

The general rule for small (single-developer or maybe teams of single digits) studios is "make games, not engines". Turns out people don't play engines, they play games. Just finishing making a game is hard enough and most don't make it that far. If you have to finish your engine before you start the remaining 90% of game development, well, keep your day job.

jcelerier 6y ago
> Turns out people don't play engines, they play games is it 100% true though ? I remember a lot of hours spent on Garry's Mod with my friend group as a teen, and that's borderline closer to a game engine than to a game
- klodolph 6y ago
  Garry’s Mod uses a well-known existing engine, the Source engine.
klodolph 6y ago
That’s a reasonable general rule but it’s too easy to remember the short version “make games, not engines” and forget the underlying advice, which is more subtle. Making a game engine first and then making a game second is a fools errand, even if your goal is to make the game engine. However, you can make the engine in parallel with the game. Making a purpose-built engine in parallel with a game can be very reasonable. Having made a number of games with and without off-the-shelf engines, whether or not a custom engine makes sense depends heavily on the specifics of your team and the game you are making.
- midnightclubbed 6y ago
  This is a great point and often forgotten at game studios. Without a game driving the engine feature set you will almost certainly end up with an engine design that tries to do 'everything' because your target is Unreal/Unity.
badsectoracula 6y ago

klodolph 6y ago

Unity, Unreal, Godot, Game Maker etc are all so popular these days it’s easy to lose sight of how you can make a game with a “custom engine”. “Make games, not engines” is fine advice in general but you can make an engine for your specific game without making that engine look like Unity. You don’t need a sophisticated custom level editor, you can just use something off the shelf like Tiled. You don’t need an extension language (like C# or Lua), you can just do the whole engine + game in one project, with one language. You might also have a valuable mental toolkit that is squandered when using an existing engine. I can’t count all the times I’ve said, “I know how to implement that, but not in Unity.” My mental model of how objects are drawn to the screen consists entirely of buffers and shader program invocations. There are also plenty of games that just don’t benefit from some of the core features of engines, like physics, and need to roll their own anyway. Some games have fairly custom needs and aren’t a good match for existing engines (like No Man’s Sky or Minecraft) and some games (especially 2D games) have very simple needs and an engine doesn’t provide as much of an edge over something like a framework (e.g. MonoGame) or platform abstraction library (e.g. SDL). Or in short, “custom engine” does not automatically mean “half-baked alternative to Unity”. Just how it’s totally fine to make your next web app backend without using a high-level framework, and it’s totally fine to make your next frontend without React. If anything, it’s easier than ever to make a frontend without React, just like it’s easier than ever to make a game without Unity.

badsectoracula 6y ago
> “Make games, not engines” is fine advice in general but you can make an engine for your specific game without making that engine look like Unity. You don’t need a sophisticated custom level editor, you can just use something off the shelf like Tiled. You don’t need an extension language (like C# or Lua), you can just do the whole engine + game in one project, with one language. Note that the original meaning behind "Make games, not engines" was exactly that (IIRC when it was originally written in a blog post that somehow became popular, Unity was still a MacOS-only engine and other engines were prohibitively expensive to indies), not that you should avoid making engines. Basically it was about focusing on making the game and have your engine implement just the features your game needs, not the feature some theoretical game might need in the future. It was an advice meant warn against scope creep. Also it was directed towards people who actually wanted to make games with their engines and it wasn't directed towards people who just wanted to focus on the tech side (even though the advice was still to have some sort of demo game to drive things). Somehow over the years people started using the phrase as if it meant "stick with making games, do not bother making engines".

gldev3 6y ago

What a nice little gist, just what i needed to get motivated over the weekend.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

One I didn't see on here—probably because they're not particularly well known—is the custom engine built by Coilworks for their game, Cloudbuilt[1]. I find this super impressive, because (A) Coilworks was tiny, and (B) Cloudbuilt is a fully 3D, polygonal game. While the simple graphics likely help, Super Cloudbuilt performs well, with great frame pacing and minimal input latency—not something I can say about a lot of more mainstream games on traditional engines. And Super Cloudbuilt is a lot of fun! --- [1] https://www.double11.com/games/supercloudbuilt/ https://www.double11.com/games/supercloudbuilt/

midnightclubbed 6y ago

Many of these game 'engines' are not engines at all in the Unreal/Unity sense of things. More a collection of libraries and code that are used to implement a game. For many games this is just fine (and sometimes a better fit than a monolithic engine). If you can't take a read-only copy of the engine and implement a game on top of that then you don't have an engine. Marketing will still want you to name the 'engine' though! Back in the earlier days of Unreal there was an industry joke that Unreal was great if you were making a single player third person space marine game on Xbox or PC. Unreal has come a very long way since then and is a truly wonderful achievement but it took a huge amount of time, resources and skill to get it to where it is now.

clarry 6y ago
> If you can't take a read-only copy of the engine and implement a game on top of that then you don't have an engine. Marketing will still want you to name the 'engine' though! I guess id Tech 1 -- which they licensed to many developers -- was not an engine then? I don't think that's a useful definition. > Back in the earlier days of Unreal there was an industry joke that Unreal was great if you were making a single player third person space marine game on Xbox or PC. Did Unreal really fall that far after the glory days of Unreal, Unreal Tournament '99, Deus Ex, Clive Barker's Undying..? Wow. The Xbox generation of games really ruined so many things.
lfowles 6y ago
> Back in the earlier days of Unreal there was an industry joke that Unreal was great if you were making a single player third person space marine game on Xbox or PC Heh! In the process of implementing custom movement similar to F-Zero, I'd have to say it's still heavily optimized towards character based games.

Laremere 6y ago

As with all things, there's a balance and a place for technical trade offs to be made. The first entry on the list, Activision/Blizzard, built Hearthstone in Unity. A better case study would look at what games are successful, and then look at what engines they use. One way to look at things, is who in recent years won the (imo) biggest indie game award, the Seumas McNally Grand Prize: - A Short Hike: Unity - Return of the Obra Dinn: Unity - Night in the Woods: Unity - Quadrilateral Cowboy: id Tech 4 - Her Story: Unity - Outer Wilds: Unity - Papers, Please: custom using OpenFL/Haxe - Cart Life: Adventure Game Studio I admittedly started looking because I knew Obra Din was Unity, so there's some bias in category selection. That brings us to 2013. That 5/8 Unity, and 7/8 using an engine. The remaining 1/8 (Papers, Please) was developed by Lukas Pope, who later made Return of the Obra Dinn in Unity. This is a list chosen by game developers, but I would think that would skew the list towards impressive custom things. I do agree with the spirit of the post: You don't have to use an engine. Nothing about a game engine is magical. There's lots of success stories on both sides.

joveian 6y ago
I am disabled and have played a bunch of games (DRM-free only, via GOG or Humble Bundle) and I can confirm that Unity games are extremely common, including on tiny 2d games, visual novels, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if over 5 of 8 games in the past decade (or at least the last 8 years) used Unity. Interestingly, from the Wikipedia page it seems that Unity was a result of "our game didn't do well but we made awesome tools". They now have 2000+ employees according to Wikipedia. The employee numbers on some of these companies is misleading. Nintendo does not just make video games, but the employee count covers everyone. CD Projekt employee count includes GOG and is somehow mostly the developer side, but GOG still has 172 employees (but not a single employee over 50, and only 2 in all of CD Projekt :/, also for anyone else wondering while I'm looking at the stats, GOG is a bit under and the rest of CD Projekt a bit over 25% women). It looks like Valve does both development and Steam with 360ish employees. Also publishers often do quite a bit of QA and such for games they publish (even if it often doesn't seem like it :/), so comparing publishers with studios that have outside publishers is also not getting the full picture. Also worth noting the open source RenPy that a number of visual novels use.

tryauuum 6y ago

can I recommend «Autumn Night 3D Shooter» here? It's a short 3d shooter with custom engine that was made with love. Author boasts about it being 100% software-renderer (in other words, it doesn't use GPU acceleration)

pengaru 6y ago

I've been dabbling a bit in game development in recent years and have so far taken the approach of just building small composable libraries or headers encompassing units of functionality as needed. This of course meant progress was rather slow-going early on, having no prior experience with things like 3D rendering or the related math, spatial indexes/collision detection, the list goes on... I figured by creating everything as needed I would at least be getting a better understanding of what's going on and how everything comes together, plus owning all of the code doesn't hurt. Last weekend I successfully participated in a 24hr irc art contest by submitting a small game using some of these components, and I'm happy to say it's a whole lot easier for me to slap something simple together today with this pile of parts than it was a couple years ago. I made a Show HN about the 24hr contest submission since it's all GPL and thought some HNers might enjoy poking at it, but it didn't seem to get any notice. This was the post if interested https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22940287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22940287

aeturnum 6y ago

Adding to the list of small, single-developer-multi-year 2d games: Starsector[1]. It's a modern descendant of a whole set of top down shooters (I found it looking for a modern Escape Velocity, but it's quite different). The developer is very active and the modding community is huge - lots of total conversions and expansions have been created by the community. [1] https://fractalsoftworks.com/ https://fractalsoftworks.com/

adrianpike 6y ago
Did you ever find a good modern Escape Velocity? I lost a lot of time to that game back in the day, and it's still one my favorites of all time.
- aeturnum 6y ago
  The answer I've found the most often is Endless Sky[1]. It's open source and has the look. I've installed it and messed about before, but never gotten enough into it to feel like it's a worthy successor (for me). Of course, EV Nova was released for Windows and still runs fine. I'll start a new campaign every few years. Not sure if you can still purchase it legally tho - the company has gone under[2]. Also - if you enjoy EV, I highly recommend checking out Subspace! It's not the same, exactly, but it scratches a lot of the same itches for me. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/404410/Endless_Sky/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/404410/Endless_Sky/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosia_Software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrosia_Software

joveian 6y ago

I was curios about Falcom since they have such consistently good games. I couldn't find a detailed lists but it sounds like most Falcom games (Including recent Ys games) use their own custom engine called the "Yamaneko Engine". Tokyo Xanadu and Cold Steel I and II (not sure about later ones) use Sony's PhyreEngine. They had 62 employees in 2019 according to Wikipedia.

CM30 6y ago

Nice list! Interesting to see the breakdown of companies and which engines they use/which ones use completely custom ones and which use modified versions of stuff like Unity and Unreal engine. That said, it might be interesting to look at companies that changed from using custom engines to stuff like Unity/Unreal at some point, or perhaps the other way around. I remember Rare originally building most of their game engines inhouse at one point, but their Xbox 360/Xbox One era games seem to have changed that. It's also interesting to note that there are also quite a few custom game engines being made for various fan game development scenes too, as well as off the shelf ones specifically made for games based on that series. Or that the same 'build games not engines' and 'unless everything is custom it's not worth it' debates exist there too. Either way, some of the notable ones there include: - Hello Engine, which was basically a hybrid of various 2D Mario titles in a way that made it very easy to use as a level editor. Has roughly the same reputation as Unity does on Steam because of that, with at least one game basically marketing itself as a parody of it as a result. - Gatete Engine, with a fairly similar featureset, but a more modern coding style - Super Mario Bros X, a level editor created by the guy behind Terraria, which has since ended up decompiled and remade in a different programming language by fans, with various forks made based on that. There are also obviously a ton of individuals and small groups building their own engines for individual games in that community too. Finally, the whole 'make games not engines' thing doesn't have to refer to the entire engine. No, it can be equally easy to get distracted by the possibility of adding extra features to an existing one too.

wxkn 6y ago

Game engines are super interesting. The variety of different things happening in the program, the audio/visual aspect, the real-time nature of the application. It's exciting to work on. It just feels like there is a software machine chugging forward. A few years ago I made a mostly crappy 2D arcade game with a custom engine ("Fractus" on Steam). It basically started as a way to learn graphics tech and try out some visualization ideas. Slowly it turned into a real project. For a long time the journey of creating an engine was the main thing. Unfortunately, I think this shows in the final game quality... still working on that. I remember reading a post about having a "forever project". It's that piece of software that you keep going back to hack on because it feels good. I find a graphics engine to be a good choice for this. If you have an idea/design/plan for a game, you probably shouldn't make your own engine without a compelling reason. But what if you don't really have an idea, yet still want to get into the programming side of games? Try working on a toy engine!

knackfuss 6y ago

I am making a custom c++ 3D game engine using openGL right now and it's a massive undertaking. I have a lot of respect for folks like Jonathan Blow who manages to be an incredible game designer while also being a super programmer. In my case, i just decided to give it a try because if i ever watch an engine/game maker software tutorial again i will most likely throw up.The amount of trivia knowledge you need to have to make something in those engines is huge and usually non transferible between them. Also if you want to make sure you will provide the absolute best experience possible for your players, you need to have control of the low level stuff. I may be wrong but i don't think Unity allows you that kind of control. Two examples are Subnautica and Firewatch, while being excelent games in their own way, fail miserably in loading up the game assets in time after player spawn (subnautica mostly) and are filled with visual artifacts and texture problems (both games) while The Witness does not give you even the smallest hickup whatsoever.

DeathArrow 6y ago
>Also if you want to make sure you will provide the absolute best experience possible for your players, you need to have control of the low level stuff. I disagree with that. Sometimes you need, sometimes you don't. >I may be wrong but i don't think Unity allows you that kind of control. It allows you to use your own level stuff, like your own custom renderer, or your own physics engines. Some studios releasing AAA games do that, because they have the resources.