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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 inste

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.
bluescrn 4y ago
These days, if you're making a game, even a fairly small indie game, you usually want it to run on as many platforms as possible. Even for a 2D game, there's big advantages to using a ready-made engine that natively supports many platforms, from mobile to high-end consoles (across OpenGL, D3D, Metal, and proprietary console rendering APIs). If you're building a game engine as a fun/learning project, that's cool. But if your goal is to make a game, pick a ready-made engine as a starting point. Whichever you choose, you'll probably end up both loving it and hating it, but you'll get a heck of a lot more game-making done than if you go down the 'build your own engine' route.
- ratww 4y ago
  You're repeating advice for people with zero experience in making games, which is fine. But it doesn't have much to do with this discussion. Casey Muratori is not teaching people how to make an indie game or an AAA. He's teaching how to make almost everything in a video game from scratch. He speaks constantly of how he's not a game-code programmer, let alone a game designer. Pretty much everyone watching it knows what they're in for, because he talks about it all the time. Those ready-made engines you're talking about have to be made by someone. Not to mention that anything beyond "basic indie game" requires someone who knows deeply how a game works. And those people are who Casey is currently educating. Someone doing Unity/Unreal for several years won't learn those things Casey is teaching unless they really dive into deeper material, and Casey is providing exactly this kind of material. This industry doesn't need more people with Junior-level experience even though they've been working at it for 20 years. Maybe this kind of education not you, and that's fine, but just because something is being taught on the internet, doesn't automatically mean you and everyone have to learn it. You gotta learn to live with it.
- jstimpfle 4y ago
  On the other hand, porting to other platforms is probably never a no-op even when building on big 3rd party tech stacks. Many of the platform specifics will shine through to the high-level code. And personally I find it rewarding to learn how to properly layer the code in order to factor out platform concerns. Many of the differences between platforms will seem kind of dull and the different platform implementations will seem kind of repetitive, but it's not terrible either if you develop on one main platform and routinely port to a handful of other platforms. I suppose that graphics APIs are the biggest annoyance here because there is comparatively a lot of setup boilerplate required, and depending on your game, considerable math code will have to be in implementation-specific shader code. There are standalone 3D graphics libraries with backends for OpenGL/Direct3D/Vulkan/Metal, not sure how well they work.
127 4y ago
I think the point here is that he has some really spicy takes that one can not call balanced or objective by any measure, while not doing anything that's impressive enough to actually deserve to be taken seriously when it comes to such sweeping claims.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  Casey has been in the industry since before DirectX existed, worked for RAD Game Tools, and likely has code in more games than you've ever even played.
  - 127 4y ago
    ...and I've been programming games since 0x13h ModeX and contributed to core industry software. Which means absolutely nothing. It's quality times quantity. Not time and acquired credentials.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
      Well then, perhaps you have inside knowledge to share that justifies your claim that Casey hasn't done anything "impressive" enough to justify his take?
- jessermeyer 4y ago
  Can you provide an example of that?
  - johnnyanmac 4y ago
    you mean this topic in general? The tweet this response came from is Casey's: https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1514420516286709760 https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1514420516286709760 >Having looked at UE5's promotional content, I'm honestly just wondering: what is the point of Unity, now? Either you don't want to deal with a big unwieldy engine, in which case you roll/mod your own, or you do, and you would just use UE5, right? What am I missing? >It seems like it is so far ahead of Unity at this point on all fronts, including asset provision (megascans + metahuman), I'm honestly just not sure what Unity's value proposition would be. Maybe devs who are sticking with Unity could fill me in? Maybe he was truly just curious on an engine he never worked in and was genuinely impressed with the car sticker UE5 was showing (another engine he almost never worked in, so getting the information purely from PR. Point for Epic's PR team). But anyone who's seen the "debates" on those engines know he just sparked another war.
TiredOfLife 4y ago
So he powers off after every video? And doesn't think about it until the next video?
tcfunk 4y ago
600 work hours give or take the 20,000 that got him the expertise required to sit down and write it in the first place. Do you end up with your own game engine, or a clone of Casey's game engine? That depends on what you already knew going into the series. Not dismissing the value of the series here, just saying the average would-be game developer likely does not have the same skillset as Casey and, unless creating game engines is the goal, would be better served by Unreal or Unity.
johnnyanmac 4y ago
>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. No, Casey can follow Handmade hero and have his own 2d game engine up and running in roughly a week, at least in "get it done" mode instead of educational mode. I'm an engine programmer myself and I sure wouldn't have my own engine spun up that fast because I'm 20 years behind Casey in that regards (as well as any other non=professional years he's spent tinkering with low level code... where I learned what programming was at 16 years). And even then, like most education these lessons don't take into account the time needed to go back and either expand on features or maintain bugs that pop up during game development. >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." To be fair, this is a result of Casey himself dissing on the most popular engine and suggesting an ultimatim that it's either UE5 or make your own engine. I'm sure Casey's been around long enough to know that his words would spark yet another unnecessary "debate" on what tools are the best for the job. When the answer should be "whatever you and your team is comfortable with". >Do you know how many people his educational videos have helped? To be honest, no. That's the tricky thing about edTech. It feels like they help a lot in the beginning, but many people outside of a govt. sanctioned school environment will drop off quickly. That's not Casey's fault, but it does make me doubt that his videos will bring about an era of homespun engines.
- syntheweave 4y ago
  What Casey is making is more like a reference guide to "if you encountered a similar problem, here is how I worked through it". Hundreds of hours of live video content is good source material for resolving a certain kind of coding bottleneck where there are no standard solutions. But it does also mean that most people, looking to solve standard problems in standard ways, had their questions answered at the very beginning, and the stuff that he's implemented since then pushes at the boundaries of his own knowledge. He doesn't have an ideal lighting or physics solution that he can clearly articulate step by step, but he also doesn't want to cut it down and leave those things unaddressed for the sake of making a consumable tutorial. So a lot of these later videos are plodding forward, revising, doing something a little hacky, coming back to it to change the approach. And I think that's valuable in a different sense - for people who want to pursue engine dev in depth, this is ideal content. They want to see that grind taking place and how someone with a lot of experience approaches things. What they should and shouldn't prioritize. It goes well outside of the usual bounds of "education", which tries to package up testable knowledge, and is more akin to seeing a top athlete's workout. Casey asking "why wouldn't you use UE5" is not being combative or ranty: it's an honest ask of what problems need solving that aren't accommodated by what is clearly the technological leader in most of the traditional metrics(render perf, hardware usage, asset pipelines for high end 3D, source access), but are accommodated by Unity. It does show his blind spot, which is that he isn't able to envision the larger span of production metrics himself - team familiarity and inertia, particular pieces of tooling and UX, etc. - but he's also trying to fill in that blind spot here.

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.

bluescrn 4y ago

These days, if you're making a game, even a fairly small indie game, you usually want it to run on as many platforms as possible. Even for a 2D game, there's big advantages to using a ready-made engine that natively supports many platforms, from mobile to high-end consoles (across OpenGL, D3D, Metal, and proprietary console rendering APIs). If you're building a game engine as a fun/learning project, that's cool. But if your goal is to make a game, pick a ready-made engine as a starting point. Whichever you choose, you'll probably end up both loving it and hating it, but you'll get a heck of a lot more game-making done than if you go down the 'build your own engine' route.

ratww 4y ago
You're repeating advice for people with zero experience in making games, which is fine. But it doesn't have much to do with this discussion. Casey Muratori is not teaching people how to make an indie game or an AAA. He's teaching how to make almost everything in a video game from scratch. He speaks constantly of how he's not a game-code programmer, let alone a game designer. Pretty much everyone watching it knows what they're in for, because he talks about it all the time. Those ready-made engines you're talking about have to be made by someone. Not to mention that anything beyond "basic indie game" requires someone who knows deeply how a game works. And those people are who Casey is currently educating. Someone doing Unity/Unreal for several years won't learn those things Casey is teaching unless they really dive into deeper material, and Casey is providing exactly this kind of material. This industry doesn't need more people with Junior-level experience even though they've been working at it for 20 years. Maybe this kind of education not you, and that's fine, but just because something is being taught on the internet, doesn't automatically mean you and everyone have to learn it. You gotta learn to live with it.
jstimpfle 4y ago
On the other hand, porting to other platforms is probably never a no-op even when building on big 3rd party tech stacks. Many of the platform specifics will shine through to the high-level code. And personally I find it rewarding to learn how to properly layer the code in order to factor out platform concerns. Many of the differences between platforms will seem kind of dull and the different platform implementations will seem kind of repetitive, but it's not terrible either if you develop on one main platform and routinely port to a handful of other platforms. I suppose that graphics APIs are the biggest annoyance here because there is comparatively a lot of setup boilerplate required, and depending on your game, considerable math code will have to be in implementation-specific shader code. There are standalone 3D graphics libraries with backends for OpenGL/Direct3D/Vulkan/Metal, not sure how well they work.

127 4y ago

I think the point here is that he has some really spicy takes that one can not call balanced or objective by any measure, while not doing anything that's impressive enough to actually deserve to be taken seriously when it comes to such sweeping claims.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Casey has been in the industry since before DirectX existed, worked for RAD Game Tools, and likely has code in more games than you've ever even played.
- 127 4y ago
  ...and I've been programming games since 0x13h ModeX and contributed to core industry software. Which means absolutely nothing. It's quality times quantity. Not time and acquired credentials.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    Well then, perhaps you have inside knowledge to share that justifies your claim that Casey hasn't done anything "impressive" enough to justify his take?
jessermeyer 4y ago
Can you provide an example of that?
- johnnyanmac 4y ago
  you mean this topic in general? The tweet this response came from is Casey's: https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1514420516286709760 https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1514420516286709760 >Having looked at UE5's promotional content, I'm honestly just wondering: what is the point of Unity, now? Either you don't want to deal with a big unwieldy engine, in which case you roll/mod your own, or you do, and you would just use UE5, right? What am I missing? >It seems like it is so far ahead of Unity at this point on all fronts, including asset provision (megascans + metahuman), I'm honestly just not sure what Unity's value proposition would be. Maybe devs who are sticking with Unity could fill me in? Maybe he was truly just curious on an engine he never worked in and was genuinely impressed with the car sticker UE5 was showing (another engine he almost never worked in, so getting the information purely from PR. Point for Epic's PR team). But anyone who's seen the "debates" on those engines know he just sparked another war.

TiredOfLife 4y ago

So he powers off after every video? And doesn't think about it until the next video?

tcfunk 4y ago

600 work hours give or take the 20,000 that got him the expertise required to sit down and write it in the first place. Do you end up with your own game engine, or a clone of Casey's game engine? That depends on what you already knew going into the series. Not dismissing the value of the series here, just saying the average would-be game developer likely does not have the same skillset as Casey and, unless creating game engines is the goal, would be better served by Unreal or Unity.

johnnyanmac 4y ago

>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. No, Casey can follow Handmade hero and have his own 2d game engine up and running in roughly a week, at least in "get it done" mode instead of educational mode. I'm an engine programmer myself and I sure wouldn't have my own engine spun up that fast because I'm 20 years behind Casey in that regards (as well as any other non=professional years he's spent tinkering with low level code... where I learned what programming was at 16 years). And even then, like most education these lessons don't take into account the time needed to go back and either expand on features or maintain bugs that pop up during game development. >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." To be fair, this is a result of Casey himself dissing on the most popular engine and suggesting an ultimatim that it's either UE5 or make your own engine. I'm sure Casey's been around long enough to know that his words would spark yet another unnecessary "debate" on what tools are the best for the job. When the answer should be "whatever you and your team is comfortable with". >Do you know how many people his educational videos have helped? To be honest, no. That's the tricky thing about edTech. It feels like they help a lot in the beginning, but many people outside of a govt. sanctioned school environment will drop off quickly. That's not Casey's fault, but it does make me doubt that his videos will bring about an era of homespun engines.

syntheweave 4y ago
What Casey is making is more like a reference guide to "if you encountered a similar problem, here is how I worked through it". Hundreds of hours of live video content is good source material for resolving a certain kind of coding bottleneck where there are no standard solutions. But it does also mean that most people, looking to solve standard problems in standard ways, had their questions answered at the very beginning, and the stuff that he's implemented since then pushes at the boundaries of his own knowledge. He doesn't have an ideal lighting or physics solution that he can clearly articulate step by step, but he also doesn't want to cut it down and leave those things unaddressed for the sake of making a consumable tutorial. So a lot of these later videos are plodding forward, revising, doing something a little hacky, coming back to it to change the approach. And I think that's valuable in a different sense - for people who want to pursue engine dev in depth, this is ideal content. They want to see that grind taking place and how someone with a lot of experience approaches things. What they should and shouldn't prioritize. It goes well outside of the usual bounds of "education", which tries to package up testable knowledge, and is more akin to seeing a top athlete's workout. Casey asking "why wouldn't you use UE5" is not being combative or ranty: it's an honest ask of what problems need solving that aren't accommodated by what is clearly the technological leader in most of the traditional metrics(render perf, hardware usage, asset pipelines for high end 3D, source access), but are accommodated by Unity. It does show his blind spot, which is that he isn't able to envision the larger span of production metrics himself - team familiarity and inertia, particular pieces of tooling and UX, etc. - but he's also trying to fill in that blind spot here.