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Not to tone police that much but I really don't get people like Casey. Like his whole thing is spending a billion years writing his game engine, and then whinin

by rtpg 4y ago

Not to tone police that much but I really don't get people like Casey. Like his whole thing is spending a billion years writing his game engine, and then whining about all these "bloated" tools. Just completely dismissive of everything that doesn't align directly with his values (which don't include actually shipping game!) I like people who write their own engines and make bespoke things for fun. Just really dislike people who lack the imagination to wonder why some people just want to make games rather than spend their life writing engine code, and actively shitting on stuff that exists. Just so much negative energy to put out in the world. Of course in practice Unity _is_ a major pain in the butt but UE has the nice aspect of actually working for very large projects and shipping stuff. Yeah there's obtuse stuff, but in practice what happens is you join a team and then you actually learn to use it. In exchange you have releases. The one thing that really is rough for me with _both_ UE and Unity is that they're both very oriented towards teams with dedicated art people who can put out assets to use. BSP-based workflows where you can quickly greybox out levels to playtest (basically giving level designers without art sense a fighting chance) are much nicer with older engines. There's a nice missing middle that Valve kinda fills with Source, except everyone that has worked with Source seems to dislike it for other reasons. But I'm sure we could make 3D engines with nicer usability for people who, for lack of a better word, can't 3D model too great.

sk0g 4y ago
Just curious, have you seen the new tools in UE5 for prototyping levels? I haven't used older game engines, but these are rapid enough for me for blocking out a level. https://twitter.com/highlyspammable/status/1496314557241098242 https://twitter.com/highlyspammable/status/14963145572410982...
- w-ll 4y ago
  ProBuilder and ProGrids (I think ProGrids is still 'experimental' but easy to install) do all of this for me.
  - sk0g 4y ago
    Not debating that, was just wondering if this is the sort of workflow they were used to. When I used ProBuilder and ProGrids, the workflows there weren't quite as intuitive for me. Not bad, I just didn't put the time in to get comfortable with them.
trzy 4y ago
I don’t understand the point about the difficulty of grayboxing with Unity. Can you elaborate? All my projects start with programmer art — often just the built-in primitive (cubes, spheres, cylinders, planes).
- rtpg 4y ago
  https://joewintergreendev.tumblr.com/post/152188146576/reposting-my-videos-about-modern-level-design https://joewintergreendev.tumblr.com/post/152188146576/repos... Here are a set of videos that compare UE4 to Valve's stuff. Just like making it easy to drop a bunch of stuff in and texture things nicely.
  - maushu 4y ago
    Have you seen probuilder for unity? Here's a old video: https://youtu.be/a8JOk8nuK0k https://youtu.be/a8JOk8nuK0k Unity basically bought this third party tool and is now a free package.
cyber_kinetist 4y ago
If you look at the background Casey was in, then his thought process becomes a bit understandable. He worked for a long time doing R&D at RAD Game Tools, which is a company that provided various game development middleware and tools. So his interests naturally gear more towards low-level game tools/systems development rather than high-level design and scripting, which is why he couldn't understand the value proposition of more widely-used monolithic game engines like Unity, Gamemaker, etc. (For example, his attitude towards actual gameplay code in Handmade Hero is "It's not my concern, I'll finish the engine and then someone else will fill the gaps"). Note that he almost did have experience in creating an actual full game by himself before, though he didn't publish it eventually since he was unsatisfied with the final product, which is quite absurd to me! (https://www.destructoid.com/he-worked-on-it-for-three-years-and-then-threw-it-away/ https://www.destructoid.com/he-worked-on-it-for-three-years-...) He also worked on The Witness team with Jonathan Blow and others, but mainly on engine programming. He is currently working on a new game called 1935 (along with his other myriad projects like Handmade Hero and Star Code Galaxy), but details about it are very, very sparse.
- Arelius 4y ago
  > He also worked on The Witness team with Jonathan Blow and others, but mainly on engine programming. Just to be clear, he came into the project much later and didn't contribute nearly as much to the game as i.e Jonathan and Ignacio.
  - throwuxiytayq 4y ago
    His contributions seem limited in scope but very significant: https://youtu.be/YE8MVNMzpbo https://youtu.be/YE8MVNMzpbo
  - Matl 4y ago
    It's worth noting that Jonathan's tone is very similar indeed.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
stuntkite 4y ago
I freaking suck at modeling and I've been at it for years. Been working with Unity and shipping stuff for a decade. It helps to know how to get the right partners I guess, but I've always been able to get stuff done with Unity. Now the momentum I have with my app store, maybe there aren't many ideas anyone could throw at me where I have to do much more than load up a few things I already own and push stuff around. I barely write code... But its' a lot of experience, unity has gotten massively better. I used to write a lot of C# and trained collaborators on Playmaker. Now it's more focused on just keeping the working directory clean, I don't really like their collab stuff, I prefer to maintain my own git. What I do and have done is never the same as what most people do for spit and polish, but I'd say Unity has the functionality especially now for people who "can't 3D model too great". I'm pretty sure Unreal can function similar too, maybe with a slightly steeper curve but some neat efficiencies. I think that reality is aaaalmost here though.
panzerboiler 4y ago
You have been overly dismissive of Casey's work. HH is a treasure, and if you consider that he explained the how and the why of every single line of code, on stream, without cutting any corner, your consideration about the time spent become meaningless. There are people interested in copy-pasting and glueing together pre-baked parts to ship something, and there are people interested in developing a deep understanding of how things work, to be able to break and reassemble new toys with complete freedom. There are people that value the product and people that value the process. Casey's work is targeted at the second group, and I thank him immensely for what he does, even if some of his rants are pretty ignorant (usually when talking about things he knows nothing about). Take the good parts. There are many.
- rtpg 4y ago
  yeah I think what he does is cool! Just like… ok if you’re that person you’re not using Unreal or Unity anyways.
- Matl 4y ago
  > You have been overly dismissive of Casey's work. I am reading it not as what Casey is doing isn't cool, just that it is not at the level to enable Casey to be himself dismissive of other people's work to the extent he is.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    Has nobody looked at what Casey did for a living before Handmade Hero?
  - rasz 4y ago
    You mean like that time he cobbled together terminal emulator in a week running at >1K fps after some MS drone called it a doctoral thesis project level of difficult?
klodolph 4y ago
> Just completely dismissive of everything that doesn't align directly with his values (which don't include actually shipping game!) I think you're reading something that's not there. Some big name (and "big" is relative) says something, like Carmack, Stallman, or even someone like Jeff Vogel, and people get up in arms about it. To be honest, I think most people are reacting to how celebrities make them feel rather than what celebrities say. If Muratori is "dismissive", it could be because you feel dismissed, or some other feeling you have, rather than something Muratori is actually saying. The biggest problem with tone policing is that it's so damn inaccurate. Anyway, we need people like Casey Muratori in the ecosystem. You get a mix of architecture astronauts and philosophizers with "just get it done and ship it" folks. Both groups of people learn things that the other group needs to know. Both groups of people build things that the other group wants to use. > Just really dislike people who lack the imagination to wonder why some people just want to make games rather than spend their life writing engine code, and actively shitting on stuff that exists. Just so much negative energy to put out in the world. Doesn't seem like Muratori to me. He does have his weird fan group that seems to amplify stuff he says 100x (like Blow and Carmack), but calling Unreal "unwieldy" is not exactly "shitting" on it. It is unwieldy, like most mature pieces of software. I often say that C++ is a trainwreck of a language, but that doesn't mean that I don't think that C++ has a value proposition. If I said that with a fan group like Muratori's weird fans, maybe it would make people more upset--as it is, I'm just some unknown commenter on HN.
mariusor 4y ago
> Like his whole thing is spending a billion years writing his game engine, [..]Just completely dismissive of everything that doesn't align directly with his values (which don't include actually shipping game!) I think Casey has been vocal enough (at least in his HMH streams) that he is not a game designer, but a game engine programmer. He is trying his hand at making full games, but I wouldn't expect him to skip over the part he is proficient at to the one at which he isn't. As long as the "why" of making his games is not "getting rich", I think it's uncharitable to sneer at his choices.
- rtpg 4y ago
  I don’t mean to sneer at his choices ( I think it’s cool and fine), I just wish he would spend less time sneering at other peoples choices (especially when that antagonism just makes it harder for someone to not get defensive).
werner1886 4y ago
You clearly have no idea what's he is all about. His message is very clear: Modern software is crap. It's orders of magnitude slower than it should be, it's buggy, and,yes, bloated. And if you ever used any piece of software today I don't see how you can you not agree with it... He is never advocating NOT using engines, but rather that one can be much better and more efficient developer with just a little bit knowledge of inner workings of an engine. Him "spending a billion years" is nonsense. Handmade Hero is his side-side project which he does once a week for couple hours. You can think of HH as a teaching tool (and not even a good one which he would admit himself im sure) and not 'here is definite guide on how you make an engine yourself'. HH inspired and showed ropes to so many developers, its value is immeasurable.
- Ygg2 4y ago
  > Modern software is crap. It's orders of magnitude slower than it should be, it's buggy, and,yes, bloated. And, that's where he lost me. Software was always crap. Emacs = Eight Megabytes and constantly swapping. Because even if you squeeze every last cent of performance, someone will have a great idea that will spend each dime you saved and then even add some debt on it. Performance is never a positive as much as a disqualifying negative. Features are what sell the software. Why would people use/pay for IDEs over a free text editor. And if you listen to Casey's advice, well, be ready to rewrite your entire stack because almost no software today is willing to do what you need. It's a good advice if you know you'll keep programming for next 120-30000 years. And don't have any competition willing to cut corners.
  - dgb23 4y ago
    A game that illustrates that success is tied to performance is factorio. Because it can scale to absurd amounts, while still running on an old labtop. It’s in a genre with notorious performance issues and limitations as well as bugs, but they managed to put in the time and effort. Some of the lessons and solutions are quite educational even. There’s games that are ridiculously simple in comparison let your fans spinning for no reason, grind to a halt or crash. Performance is key here, as it is one of the most limiting factors for _both_ quality and features. Namely the things you can do and how well you can do them is tied to performance. If you are pushing those in any dimension, then you want control.
ashkankiani 4y ago
Roughly 600 episodes translates to roughly 600 work hours. That's 15 weeks. And now it's a full 3D game engine. Because he's not doing it contiguously and instead doing it once a week or so (there are breaks sometimes), it's continued over many years. So by episode 40, he's done about 1 normal work-weeks worth of work (and in truth, constantly starting and stopping affects the productivity, as does doing it live and explaining yourself. Imagine your productivity hit while doing pair programming, basically). In that time, he's already got a hot reloading 2D engine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBCOijN2fNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBCOijN2fNA . And he's not exactly implementing it for speed of getting something done, but for educational purposes, by doing things like explicitly not using libraries, implementing PNG decompression, math functions, and doing software rendering first, and then switching to hardware acceleration even though he knew he would eventually do hardware acceleration anyway. His point stands up completely. You can follow handmade hero and have your own 2D game engine up and running in roughly 1 week's time. Furthermore, it's pretty disgusting to call an educational project that's had hundreds of hours poured into it "spending a billion years writing his game engine, and then whining about all these 'bloated' tools." Do you know how many people his educational videos have helped? The amount of patience and dedication it takes to answer all of these beginner questions and explain things way below his level of experience in terms of difficulty qualifies him for sainthood in my opinion.
- rtpg 4y ago
  I think making the content he makes is very very cool! I think it empowers people and is super interesting! I think that kind of content is few and far between as well. I just don’t believe that he has good judgement about what makes sense for people making games professionally in this specific context. And I think he could be much happier in his life if he just didn’t feel the need to shit on other peoples work. You can do cool stuff in your corner of the world without being obsessed with what other people are doing.
  - ratww 4y ago
    He’s not doing that to engines in this case, though. The quote in the article is complimentary of UE5. And whenever he complained about bloated tools he put his money where his mouth was, depite people claiming it was impossible, or that it would take several man-years. If anything, you are the one “shitting on other peoples work” here by claiming he’s “spending a billion years”, or saying he’s not capable of judging something in his area of expertise. He’s one of the most knowledgeable experts in this field, make no mistake.
sph 4y ago
I don't get Casey's point nor your dislike for him either. I think that between writing your game engine and going full UE5 there is space for a middle ground of smaller, simpler engines. If I were to write a game today, unless I wanted that AAA look with UE5, that middle ground is where I'd look and be most productive. Still waiting for Godot 4 here.
- runevault 4y ago
  He's not saying don't use UE5. He's saying what's the point of Unity now that UE5 exists.
  - sph 4y ago
    I know. I'm saying there IS a need for Unity, while Casey argues that either you go full UE5 or you write your game engine. Black or white. UE5 is too complex for most indie devs, not good at 2d and pixel art, and writing your game engine as a small team is a good way of spending 2 years on engine code, instead of, you know, actually developing a game.
    - runevault 4y ago
      To be clear I agree with you. I use Unity for my hobby stuff because I have 0 interest in using either their subset of C++ nor Blueprints (the only things that visual scripting style things appeal to me are 1. Shaders and 2. content generation in Blender). Just the way you phrased it made it sound like he was against UE as well.
skinpop 4y ago
I don't think that's fair. Sure HH has been going on for eight years, but on average Casey is only putting in 3-4 hours per week. That's not even half a work-day per week. Not to mention that he spends a lot of time explaining every single decision he makes and does black-boarded lectures on pretty much every subject covered in the series. I think it's reasonable to assume progress would be at least 3-4 times faster if his focus was solely on the code. So what you call "a billion years" is actually more like a total 2-4 months of fulltime coding.
- vanviegen 4y ago
  That's assuming each episode doesn't take him any preparation time.
chmod775 4y ago
> Not to tone police that much but I really don't get people like Casey. Like his whole thing is spending a billion years writing his game engine, and then whining about all these "bloated" tools. It takes some rather strong motivation (and opinions!) to make your own. If you were fine with whatever was already there, you probably wouldn't bother...
fulafel 4y ago
The "not shipping" criticism is too harsh I think - most game projects fail to ship after all, and having worked on some non-shipped games plus having worked on standard setting components shipped in zillions of games is a respectable career.
torginus 4y ago
I think a balance needs to be found. Maybe what you're looking for in Casey is not what he provides. He tries to provide people with sound engineering foundations on which huge engines can be built. I think this isn't what a lot of people (including me) are looking for. They are looking for a tutorial on how to build a relatively competent engine from scratch in a decent amount of time. Which is entirely possible, I don't claim to have Casey's engineering chops, but in college (about a decade ago), I built an engine with dynamic lighting, physics, loading 3d models and integrated Lua scripting from scratch in about a month while doing my classes. It was as I remember, between 10k and 20k lines, of not very pretty code. While I wouldn't show the code as an example to anyone, even if I had it, I think people need to realize, that for their own game, writing the necessary engine plumbing might be entirely possible, and a lot more possible nowadays, and if people actually built a community around this attitude, a lot of tooling, whose lack can be painful now, might just emerge from folks. I think if you can build solid engine foundations in a month, that's a lot less time than what you'd have to spend with wresting Unity's broken, undocumented, ship-of-Theseus, features (Scriptable Render Pipelines), doing frustrating trial and error, and mining obscure forum posts for nuggets of info.
rawoke083600 4y ago
Who is "Casey" ?
- ratww 4y ago
  Casey Muratori, the guy who praised UE5 and criticised Unity in the quote in the article.
edem 4y ago
So which engine is this guy working on? I checked his twitter and his website but there is no mention about the actual engine (only that he is working on one).
- ratww 4y ago
  He's not currently working on an engine per se (at least not publicly), but he's has a streaming channel where he teaches the fundaments needed for understanding and potentially being able to build one.
  - edem 4y ago
    So he is all bark no bite. Got it.
    - ratww 4y ago
      Where did the guy even bark? He publicly praised Unreal Engine 5. Also, why does he have to be working on an engine? He has worked on some others and is one of the few with enough credentials to criticize. In this case he’s not even criticizing, just asking questions which are not really trivial to answer.
tomc1985 4y ago
Why are so many afraid of "negative energy"? Let the man be weird. He doesn't exist to serve your opinion. Open your mind, dude
skocznymroczny 4y ago
I find him to be elitist sometimes. The community he built around himself likes to gatekeep by defining what is considered "from scratch" and what isn't. I looked up his youtube channel, and it seems he spent few weeks writing an abstraction layer over WinAPI. You could just download SDL and get it over with in a day (and support more platforms). I don't think there's anything wrong with that. There's a difference between using a large framework/engine, where you only give inputs in and get outputs out, and using small libraries to abstract over specific parts of logic. And even after a year of work, the "engine" seems to be very unimpressive, capable of doing some basic 3D graphics.
- ratww 4y ago
  The whole point of the series is teaching the necessary skills for understanding, writing and maintaining something from scratch, like an engine if need be, but also something like SDL too. Like it or not, this is interesting to a lot of people. Plus, someone has to maintain and contribute to those libraries like SDL. This is where you learn to. Plus if you want to see libraries being used there are countless other Youtube channels doing it. This one is just daring to be a bit different. About the elitism accusations, I frankly don’t see it, and I believe you are strongly projecting your own insecurities here. There is even a semi-official “port” that uses SDL2, done by an audience member. Accusations of the community being “anti-library” are unfounded, especially considering Casey’s first notable work was in a company that would sell high performance libraries for games (RAD Tools).
rosenjcb 4y ago
>The one thing that really is rough for me with _both_ UE and Unity is that they're both very oriented towards teams with dedicated art people who can put out assets to use. BSP-based workflows where you can quickly greybox out levels to playtest (basically giving level designers without art sense a fighting chance) are much nicer with older engines. That's because the value proposition with most games is in their art direction and gameplay - nobody cares how you get the polygon on the screen. I wrote my own game engine for a bit but then realized that all the work once the scaffolding was complete was in creating a fun game. Turns out that I don't really enjoy level editing and 3D modeling as much, so I stopped developing the project.
curyous 4y ago
I think you might have missed his point. The gist of it is that almost all modern software is at least 100x slower than it needs to be, for no good reason. Conventional software practises result in unnecessarily complex code that takes much longer to write and to execute than needed. The problem is so endemic that there isn't really even a good programming language available that makes it easy to use the capabilities of computers. Fortunately there are a few pioneers trying to improve things, constructively creating solutions such as JAI. Casey is fighting against the fact that not only are industry participants unaware of the problem, buy they actually fight to write bad code to ship bad software to customers because they believe that is the pinnacle.

by rtpg 4y ago

sk0g 4y ago

Just curious, have you seen the new tools in UE5 for prototyping levels? I haven't used older game engines, but these are rapid enough for me for blocking out a level. https://twitter.com/highlyspammable/status/1496314557241098242 https://twitter.com/highlyspammable/status/14963145572410982...

w-ll 4y ago
ProBuilder and ProGrids (I think ProGrids is still 'experimental' but easy to install) do all of this for me.
- sk0g 4y ago
  Not debating that, was just wondering if this is the sort of workflow they were used to. When I used ProBuilder and ProGrids, the workflows there weren't quite as intuitive for me. Not bad, I just didn't put the time in to get comfortable with them.

trzy 4y ago

I don’t understand the point about the difficulty of grayboxing with Unity. Can you elaborate? All my projects start with programmer art — often just the built-in primitive (cubes, spheres, cylinders, planes).

rtpg 4y ago
https://joewintergreendev.tumblr.com/post/152188146576/reposting-my-videos-about-modern-level-design https://joewintergreendev.tumblr.com/post/152188146576/repos... Here are a set of videos that compare UE4 to Valve's stuff. Just like making it easy to drop a bunch of stuff in and texture things nicely.
- maushu 4y ago
  Have you seen probuilder for unity? Here's a old video: https://youtu.be/a8JOk8nuK0k https://youtu.be/a8JOk8nuK0k Unity basically bought this third party tool and is now a free package.

cyber_kinetist 4y ago

If you look at the background Casey was in, then his thought process becomes a bit understandable. He worked for a long time doing R&D at RAD Game Tools, which is a company that provided various game development middleware and tools. So his interests naturally gear more towards low-level game tools/systems development rather than high-level design and scripting, which is why he couldn't understand the value proposition of more widely-used monolithic game engines like Unity, Gamemaker, etc. (For example, his attitude towards actual gameplay code in Handmade Hero is "It's not my concern, I'll finish the engine and then someone else will fill the gaps"). Note that he almost did have experience in creating an actual full game by himself before, though he didn't publish it eventually since he was unsatisfied with the final product, which is quite absurd to me! (https://www.destructoid.com/he-worked-on-it-for-three-years-and-then-threw-it-away/ https://www.destructoid.com/he-worked-on-it-for-three-years-...) He also worked on The Witness team with Jonathan Blow and others, but mainly on engine programming. He is currently working on a new game called 1935 (along with his other myriad projects like Handmade Hero and Star Code Galaxy), but details about it are very, very sparse.

Arelius 4y ago
> He also worked on The Witness team with Jonathan Blow and others, but mainly on engine programming. Just to be clear, he came into the project much later and didn't contribute nearly as much to the game as i.e Jonathan and Ignacio.
- throwuxiytayq 4y ago
  His contributions seem limited in scope but very significant: https://youtu.be/YE8MVNMzpbo https://youtu.be/YE8MVNMzpbo
- Matl 4y ago
  It's worth noting that Jonathan's tone is very similar indeed.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

stuntkite 4y ago

I freaking suck at modeling and I've been at it for years. Been working with Unity and shipping stuff for a decade. It helps to know how to get the right partners I guess, but I've always been able to get stuff done with Unity. Now the momentum I have with my app store, maybe there aren't many ideas anyone could throw at me where I have to do much more than load up a few things I already own and push stuff around. I barely write code... But its' a lot of experience, unity has gotten massively better. I used to write a lot of C# and trained collaborators on Playmaker. Now it's more focused on just keeping the working directory clean, I don't really like their collab stuff, I prefer to maintain my own git. What I do and have done is never the same as what most people do for spit and polish, but I'd say Unity has the functionality especially now for people who "can't 3D model too great". I'm pretty sure Unreal can function similar too, maybe with a slightly steeper curve but some neat efficiencies. I think that reality is aaaalmost here though.

panzerboiler 4y ago

You have been overly dismissive of Casey's work. HH is a treasure, and if you consider that he explained the how and the why of every single line of code, on stream, without cutting any corner, your consideration about the time spent become meaningless. There are people interested in copy-pasting and glueing together pre-baked parts to ship something, and there are people interested in developing a deep understanding of how things work, to be able to break and reassemble new toys with complete freedom. There are people that value the product and people that value the process. Casey's work is targeted at the second group, and I thank him immensely for what he does, even if some of his rants are pretty ignorant (usually when talking about things he knows nothing about). Take the good parts. There are many.

rtpg 4y ago
yeah I think what he does is cool! Just like… ok if you’re that person you’re not using Unreal or Unity anyways.
Matl 4y ago
> You have been overly dismissive of Casey's work. I am reading it not as what Casey is doing isn't cool, just that it is not at the level to enable Casey to be himself dismissive of other people's work to the extent he is.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Has nobody looked at what Casey did for a living before Handmade Hero?
- rasz 4y ago
  You mean like that time he cobbled together terminal emulator in a week running at >1K fps after some MS drone called it a doctoral thesis project level of difficult?

klodolph 4y ago

> Just completely dismissive of everything that doesn't align directly with his values (which don't include actually shipping game!) I think you're reading something that's not there. Some big name (and "big" is relative) says something, like Carmack, Stallman, or even someone like Jeff Vogel, and people get up in arms about it. To be honest, I think most people are reacting to how celebrities make them feel rather than what celebrities say. If Muratori is "dismissive", it could be because you feel dismissed, or some other feeling you have, rather than something Muratori is actually saying. The biggest problem with tone policing is that it's so damn inaccurate. Anyway, we need people like Casey Muratori in the ecosystem. You get a mix of architecture astronauts and philosophizers with "just get it done and ship it" folks. Both groups of people learn things that the other group needs to know. Both groups of people build things that the other group wants to use. > Just really dislike people who lack the imagination to wonder why some people just want to make games rather than spend their life writing engine code, and actively shitting on stuff that exists. Just so much negative energy to put out in the world. Doesn't seem like Muratori to me. He does have his weird fan group that seems to amplify stuff he says 100x (like Blow and Carmack), but calling Unreal "unwieldy" is not exactly "shitting" on it. It is unwieldy, like most mature pieces of software. I often say that C++ is a trainwreck of a language, but that doesn't mean that I don't think that C++ has a value proposition. If I said that with a fan group like Muratori's weird fans, maybe it would make people more upset--as it is, I'm just some unknown commenter on HN.

mariusor 4y ago

> Like his whole thing is spending a billion years writing his game engine, [..]Just completely dismissive of everything that doesn't align directly with his values (which don't include actually shipping game!) I think Casey has been vocal enough (at least in his HMH streams) that he is not a game designer, but a game engine programmer. He is trying his hand at making full games, but I wouldn't expect him to skip over the part he is proficient at to the one at which he isn't. As long as the "why" of making his games is not "getting rich", I think it's uncharitable to sneer at his choices.

rtpg 4y ago
I don’t mean to sneer at his choices ( I think it’s cool and fine), I just wish he would spend less time sneering at other peoples choices (especially when that antagonism just makes it harder for someone to not get defensive).

werner1886 4y ago

You clearly have no idea what's he is all about. His message is very clear: Modern software is crap. It's orders of magnitude slower than it should be, it's buggy, and,yes, bloated. And if you ever used any piece of software today I don't see how you can you not agree with it... He is never advocating NOT using engines, but rather that one can be much better and more efficient developer with just a little bit knowledge of inner workings of an engine. Him "spending a billion years" is nonsense. Handmade Hero is his side-side project which he does once a week for couple hours. You can think of HH as a teaching tool (and not even a good one which he would admit himself im sure) and not 'here is definite guide on how you make an engine yourself'. HH inspired and showed ropes to so many developers, its value is immeasurable.

Ygg2 4y ago
> Modern software is crap. It's orders of magnitude slower than it should be, it's buggy, and,yes, bloated. And, that's where he lost me. Software was always crap. Emacs = Eight Megabytes and constantly swapping. Because even if you squeeze every last cent of performance, someone will have a great idea that will spend each dime you saved and then even add some debt on it. Performance is never a positive as much as a disqualifying negative. Features are what sell the software. Why would people use/pay for IDEs over a free text editor. And if you listen to Casey's advice, well, be ready to rewrite your entire stack because almost no software today is willing to do what you need. It's a good advice if you know you'll keep programming for next 120-30000 years. And don't have any competition willing to cut corners.
- dgb23 4y ago
  A game that illustrates that success is tied to performance is factorio. Because it can scale to absurd amounts, while still running on an old labtop. It’s in a genre with notorious performance issues and limitations as well as bugs, but they managed to put in the time and effort. Some of the lessons and solutions are quite educational even. There’s games that are ridiculously simple in comparison let your fans spinning for no reason, grind to a halt or crash. Performance is key here, as it is one of the most limiting factors for _both_ quality and features. Namely the things you can do and how well you can do them is tied to performance. If you are pushing those in any dimension, then you want control.

ashkankiani 4y ago

Roughly 600 episodes translates to roughly 600 work hours. That's 15 weeks. And now it's a full 3D game engine. Because he's not doing it contiguously and instead doing it once a week or so (there are breaks sometimes), it's continued over many years. So by episode 40, he's done about 1 normal work-weeks worth of work (and in truth, constantly starting and stopping affects the productivity, as does doing it live and explaining yourself. Imagine your productivity hit while doing pair programming, basically). In that time, he's already got a hot reloading 2D engine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBCOijN2fNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBCOijN2fNA . And he's not exactly implementing it for speed of getting something done, but for educational purposes, by doing things like explicitly not using libraries, implementing PNG decompression, math functions, and doing software rendering first, and then switching to hardware acceleration even though he knew he would eventually do hardware acceleration anyway. His point stands up completely. You can follow handmade hero and have your own 2D game engine up and running in roughly 1 week's time. Furthermore, it's pretty disgusting to call an educational project that's had hundreds of hours poured into it "spending a billion years writing his game engine, and then whining about all these 'bloated' tools." Do you know how many people his educational videos have helped? The amount of patience and dedication it takes to answer all of these beginner questions and explain things way below his level of experience in terms of difficulty qualifies him for sainthood in my opinion.

rtpg 4y ago
I think making the content he makes is very very cool! I think it empowers people and is super interesting! I think that kind of content is few and far between as well. I just don’t believe that he has good judgement about what makes sense for people making games professionally in this specific context. And I think he could be much happier in his life if he just didn’t feel the need to shit on other peoples work. You can do cool stuff in your corner of the world without being obsessed with what other people are doing.
- ratww 4y ago
  He’s not doing that to engines in this case, though. The quote in the article is complimentary of UE5. And whenever he complained about bloated tools he put his money where his mouth was, depite people claiming it was impossible, or that it would take several man-years. If anything, you are the one “shitting on other peoples work” here by claiming he’s “spending a billion years”, or saying he’s not capable of judging something in his area of expertise. He’s one of the most knowledgeable experts in this field, make no mistake.

sph 4y ago

I don't get Casey's point nor your dislike for him either. I think that between writing your game engine and going full UE5 there is space for a middle ground of smaller, simpler engines. If I were to write a game today, unless I wanted that AAA look with UE5, that middle ground is where I'd look and be most productive. Still waiting for Godot 4 here.

runevault 4y ago
He's not saying don't use UE5. He's saying what's the point of Unity now that UE5 exists.
- sph 4y ago
  I know. I'm saying there IS a need for Unity, while Casey argues that either you go full UE5 or you write your game engine. Black or white. UE5 is too complex for most indie devs, not good at 2d and pixel art, and writing your game engine as a small team is a good way of spending 2 years on engine code, instead of, you know, actually developing a game.
  - runevault 4y ago
    To be clear I agree with you. I use Unity for my hobby stuff because I have 0 interest in using either their subset of C++ nor Blueprints (the only things that visual scripting style things appeal to me are 1. Shaders and 2. content generation in Blender). Just the way you phrased it made it sound like he was against UE as well.

skinpop 4y ago

I don't think that's fair. Sure HH has been going on for eight years, but on average Casey is only putting in 3-4 hours per week. That's not even half a work-day per week. Not to mention that he spends a lot of time explaining every single decision he makes and does black-boarded lectures on pretty much every subject covered in the series. I think it's reasonable to assume progress would be at least 3-4 times faster if his focus was solely on the code. So what you call "a billion years" is actually more like a total 2-4 months of fulltime coding.

vanviegen 4y ago
That's assuming each episode doesn't take him any preparation time.

chmod775 4y ago

> Not to tone police that much but I really don't get people like Casey. Like his whole thing is spending a billion years writing his game engine, and then whining about all these "bloated" tools. It takes some rather strong motivation (and opinions!) to make your own. If you were fine with whatever was already there, you probably wouldn't bother...

fulafel 4y ago

The "not shipping" criticism is too harsh I think - most game projects fail to ship after all, and having worked on some non-shipped games plus having worked on standard setting components shipped in zillions of games is a respectable career.

torginus 4y ago

I think a balance needs to be found. Maybe what you're looking for in Casey is not what he provides. He tries to provide people with sound engineering foundations on which huge engines can be built. I think this isn't what a lot of people (including me) are looking for. They are looking for a tutorial on how to build a relatively competent engine from scratch in a decent amount of time. Which is entirely possible, I don't claim to have Casey's engineering chops, but in college (about a decade ago), I built an engine with dynamic lighting, physics, loading 3d models and integrated Lua scripting from scratch in about a month while doing my classes. It was as I remember, between 10k and 20k lines, of not very pretty code. While I wouldn't show the code as an example to anyone, even if I had it, I think people need to realize, that for their own game, writing the necessary engine plumbing might be entirely possible, and a lot more possible nowadays, and if people actually built a community around this attitude, a lot of tooling, whose lack can be painful now, might just emerge from folks. I think if you can build solid engine foundations in a month, that's a lot less time than what you'd have to spend with wresting Unity's broken, undocumented, ship-of-Theseus, features (Scriptable Render Pipelines), doing frustrating trial and error, and mining obscure forum posts for nuggets of info.

rawoke083600 4y ago

Who is "Casey" ?

ratww 4y ago
Casey Muratori, the guy who praised UE5 and criticised Unity in the quote in the article.

edem 4y ago

So which engine is this guy working on? I checked his twitter and his website but there is no mention about the actual engine (only that he is working on one).

ratww 4y ago
He's not currently working on an engine per se (at least not publicly), but he's has a streaming channel where he teaches the fundaments needed for understanding and potentially being able to build one.
- edem 4y ago
  So he is all bark no bite. Got it.
  - ratww 4y ago
    Where did the guy even bark? He publicly praised Unreal Engine 5. Also, why does he have to be working on an engine? He has worked on some others and is one of the few with enough credentials to criticize. In this case he’s not even criticizing, just asking questions which are not really trivial to answer.

tomc1985 4y ago

Why are so many afraid of "negative energy"? Let the man be weird. He doesn't exist to serve your opinion. Open your mind, dude

skocznymroczny 4y ago

I find him to be elitist sometimes. The community he built around himself likes to gatekeep by defining what is considered "from scratch" and what isn't. I looked up his youtube channel, and it seems he spent few weeks writing an abstraction layer over WinAPI. You could just download SDL and get it over with in a day (and support more platforms). I don't think there's anything wrong with that. There's a difference between using a large framework/engine, where you only give inputs in and get outputs out, and using small libraries to abstract over specific parts of logic. And even after a year of work, the "engine" seems to be very unimpressive, capable of doing some basic 3D graphics.

ratww 4y ago
The whole point of the series is teaching the necessary skills for understanding, writing and maintaining something from scratch, like an engine if need be, but also something like SDL too. Like it or not, this is interesting to a lot of people. Plus, someone has to maintain and contribute to those libraries like SDL. This is where you learn to. Plus if you want to see libraries being used there are countless other Youtube channels doing it. This one is just daring to be a bit different. About the elitism accusations, I frankly don’t see it, and I believe you are strongly projecting your own insecurities here. There is even a semi-official “port” that uses SDL2, done by an audience member. Accusations of the community being “anti-library” are unfounded, especially considering Casey’s first notable work was in a company that would sell high performance libraries for games (RAD Tools).

rosenjcb 4y ago

>The one thing that really is rough for me with _both_ UE and Unity is that they're both very oriented towards teams with dedicated art people who can put out assets to use. BSP-based workflows where you can quickly greybox out levels to playtest (basically giving level designers without art sense a fighting chance) are much nicer with older engines. That's because the value proposition with most games is in their art direction and gameplay - nobody cares how you get the polygon on the screen. I wrote my own game engine for a bit but then realized that all the work once the scaffolding was complete was in creating a fun game. Turns out that I don't really enjoy level editing and 3D modeling as much, so I stopped developing the project.

curyous 4y ago

I think you might have missed his point. The gist of it is that almost all modern software is at least 100x slower than it needs to be, for no good reason. Conventional software practises result in unnecessarily complex code that takes much longer to write and to execute than needed. The problem is so endemic that there isn't really even a good programming language available that makes it easy to use the capabilities of computers. Fortunately there are a few pioneers trying to improve things, constructively creating solutions such as JAI. Casey is fighting against the fact that not only are industry participants unaware of the problem, buy they actually fight to write bad code to ship bad software to customers because they believe that is the pinnacle.