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This person might as well said that he is not planning to finish his game. Screwing around with tooling and languages seems to be a common pitfall to not finis

• markdog12 4y ago
  > And the most important reason: I just feel like it!
• naikrovek 4y ago
  > Why not just use the best ecosystem like Unreal/Unity laughable. absolutely laughable. I'm not even talking about politics of using an engine versus writing one; unity and unreal are complex tools with their own problems. if you value what you are producing, and if you value quality and you want your game to be just the way you want it, Unity and Unreal will fight you just as hard as D or C++ have been for the blog author. Unity/Unreal are also simply not capable of a lot of things. They are definitely not a pure win for someone making a game.
  • nomel 4y ago
    Could you give an examples of a game that used a custom game engines that couldn’t achieve what they wanted in Unreal or Unity? Edit: The only style I would think would be infinite/strange geometry, like Manifold garden (great game!). But, it’s Unity.
    • jessermeyer 4y ago
      I've worked on several. You haven't heard of them because none of them shipped due to issues with commercial engines (in particular Unreal Engine 4). They are very difficult to use if the game play semantics are complicated and require lots of interaction with world state or world geometry. If you're making a common FPS, they are great.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • nomel 4y ago
        > They are very difficult to use if the game play semantics are complicated and require lots of interaction with world state or world geometry. Could you give an example? I’m trying to understand what the limits look like. It appears to be trivial to you, but for someone outside of game design, I can’t imagine what those might be.
        • jessermeyer 4y ago
          We almost never hit technical limits in the renderer, streaming systems, etc. Instead, we found that pushing gameplay systems beyond the prototype stage would require more and more effort, as we'd encounter deep engine bugs, or the tooling simply did not cater to our use case. We ended up implementing more and more tooling outside the engine, and there comes a point where UE4 became a IO/Rendering system. We'd've been happier if the engine were modular in design from the get-go.
          • nomel 4y ago
            Sorry, I think we're stuck in a loop. > we found that pushing gameplay systems beyond the prototype stage would require more and more effort I understand that you're saying that some systems exist that can't work. I'm trying to understand what those systems would look like, and how the user would see it as being different. Do you have an example of the system/mechanic that can't work?
            • jessermeyer 4y ago
              Not at a high level that is easy to express in a HN post, sorry. It's one of those "the devil is in the details and there are a lot of details".
    • dmitriid 4y ago
      > Could you give an examples of a game that used a custom game engines that couldn’t achieve what they wanted in Unreal or Unity? A game that doesn't require a multi-gigabyte download and a top-tier GPU and CPU to render stuff in 2D? ;) There are many reasons people might want to opt out of existing game engines: full control over rendering pipelines, assets and dev. experience might be some of them.
      • nomel 4y ago
        Sure, but what does that mean, to the actual end product? Do you have any examples? I’m not a game dev, so to me, I would naively assume that these wouldn’t be limiting, or laughable, as the original comment suggested.
        • dmitriid 4y ago
          jai's author, Jonathan Blow, always creates a game from scratch. His games: Braid (highest rated XBox Live title when released, "Xbox Live Arcade Game of the Year", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgGeBOC0PX4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgGeBOC0PX4) and Witness (while not winning significant awards, regularly appears in Best of Decade games lists, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URjb3RBIe7c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URjb3RBIe7c). Besides that there are multiple games where people use their own engines: - Possibly among some of the most technically complex ones are Factorio (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRYQcVb_5W0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRYQcVb_5W0) and Noita (where every single pixel in the humongous world is simulated https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prXuyMCgbTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prXuyMCgbTc) - Among the AAA-level crowd there's Decima (Death Stranding https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCI396HyhbQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCI396HyhbQ and Horizon Zero Dawn https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4-FCsiF5x4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4-FCsiF5x4) and REDEngine (Witcher 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHc3JZixRY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHc3JZixRY, Cyberpunk 2077 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO8lX3hDU30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO8lX3hDU30) - There are smaller ones like Monkey X (Crypt of the Necrodancer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_avgU1u6yM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_avgU1u6yM) - There are bigger ones like Clausewitz (basically all of Paradox Interactive's games like Crusader Kings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M9qKVCl6HQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M9qKVCl6HQ and Stellaris https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoAkomMEFQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoAkomMEFQo) In general, once you know what you're doing it sometimes pays to develop your own engine that is specific to what you're doing. Unity and Unreal are generalist enines that you still to bend to your will to do what you need to do and may have opinionated setups of things that are hard to work around, or maybe are omitted from the engine, or just plain don't allow you to do.
  • klodolph 4y ago
    > laughable. absolutely laughable. It’s really not laughable. I’ve made games with off-the-shelf engines and I’ve made games using just code and libraries. Sometimes not even libraries. The main concern here is that you have a limited amount of time to work on your game. Some people try to sidestep this concern by saying that they’ll “spend as much time as it takes” or something like that, but since these projects often fail due to attrition, I’m skeptical. Engines like Unity and Unreal have plenty of constraints and they fight you, but you don’t have to fight them unless you have powerful, immovable, inflexible opinions about how the game code should be implemented. Otherwise, these engines give you a surprising amount of freedom. This freedom is not apparent to casual users of the engines and it’s not apparent if you read forums explaining how these engines are used. > They are definitely not a pure win for someone making a game. Sure. Not a pure win. In some sense, however, time is interchangeable with time. By choosing an engine like Unity or Unreal, you save some time in some areas of the project, and that time can be reinvested in other parts of your project. You end up with a higher-quality game in the same amount of time, in typical scenarios. Or you end up with a similar-quality game in a smaller amount of time, in typical scenarios.
    • cyber_kinetist 4y ago
      If the game was a more typical 3D action-adventure or FPS/TPS shooter, then using one of the two engines might have been much better for development time. But this is a complex 2D sandbox simulator with procedural generation and a custom physics engine, so I'm not sure how Unity or Unreal might aid in developing this game in any way.
      • klodolph 4y ago
        I’ll pick Unity to talk about here, because I have the most experience with Unity. I’ve gone in more depth discussing Unity “off the beaten path” before and I think people really overestimate how much you are constrained by the way Unity works. This applies both to seasoned Unity developers and to people who only take a quick look at Unity. I claim, - You can use your own physics engine with Unity, - You can model entities however you want with Unity, even not modeling them as GameObject instances containing MonoBehaviour components, - It is completely reasonable to develop an actual, real game this way, under realistic staff / expertise / schedule / budget constraints. (In fact, it is known that certain successful commercial games do this.) Just to focus on a more specific example—let’s say you need your own physics engine. What’s an easy way to do that? Create your physics engine, and have it control the positions of Unity GameObject instances. This way you can easily set up test scenes in the Unity editor and see the results by hitting “play”. Unity gives you this fantastic GUI for setting up these test scenes and a renderer you can use to visualize your physics engine behavior. This is really not “abusing” the Unity engine in any way. The engine provides physics simulation, but it does not force you to use it. Likewise—I’ve written games in Unity that do a lot of procedural generation, and I’ve written games without an off-the-shelf engine that do procedural generation. There are a lot of things that make it easier in Unity, and I’m not spending as much time fussing about with builds, or dealing with input, or figuring out how to port my game to other systems. Unity provides an API for me to create a mesh at run-time. During procedural generation, I generate the meshes for generated chunks of terrain, and the data structures look very similar to the way I would have written the data structures in my own engine.
  • mrtweetyhack 4y ago
• phendrenad2 4y ago
  > get the game out of the door fast But at what cost? Using Unity/Unreal incur the cost of lower flexibility in your design, more time spent learning "the unreal way"/"the unity way", and a finished product that looks and feels like every other unity/unreal game. Of course the argument for unity/unreal is also true: Building your own game engine takes lots and lots of time. So it's a tradeoff, like all things.
• cyber_kinetist 4y ago
  I think for the type of game that he's working on ("a 2D physics sandbox game that lets you explore the galaxy"), a custom handmade engine might be far better than using one of the mainstream game engines. His game is in 2D, so the shiny 3D renderers that Unity and Unreal have won't really matter that much. And his game seems to contain lots of performance-sensitive physics and geometry code that needs to be tailor-made to his game, so the default solutions in Unity and Unreal will be probably be unusable (so they would need to be written from scratch anyway). The goal he's setting for is very ambitious even for a 2D game, and Unity/Unreal will probably limit him too much. That said, I think many of the decisions towards his rewrite in Jai seems to come from him picking the wrong language (D) at the start. He should have sticked with C++ in the first place, even with all its warts and complexities. It's a proven language that has shipped countless games, have tons of tooling developed around it, and provides one of the biggest ecosystems available to a game developer (and unlike D, has debuggers that actually work!). And you can certainly improve compile times a lot by using unity builds, managing your header dependencies well, and not going too overboard with templates (though I agree this can become a major pain point, especially if you're using a laptop).
• skohan 4y ago
  "Kitchen Sink" engines like Unreal and Unity come with their own set of assumptions which may or may not help to deliver a given game. If you want to make a game which is radically different than the industry standard, you're going to have to spend a lot of time working around those baked-in assumptions, and it may be more efficient to choose another approach.
• actuallyalys 4y ago
  Rewrites in whatever language or tool catches your eye are a common pitfall (although you often learn a lot in the process), but moving to Unity would also be a rewrite. It might be a harder rewrite, in fact, because the author would have to adapt to a new language and a new engine. They might be able to use Unity features instead of rewriting some code but they’d still have to figure out how to use those features.
• zero_iq 4y ago
  Ironically, Unreal Engine was in large part born from Tim Sweeney's "screwing around with tooling and languages". UnrealScript has long been dropped in favour of C++, but I'm pretty sure Unreal Engine wouldn't exist today, or would be a very different beast, if it hadn't been for UnrealScript and the Unreal Editor being bundled with the original Unreal and its sequels/follow-ups, and Tim's personal interest and research into how programming languages might improve game development, in much the same way that Jonathan Blow is doing now. Can I assume your use of the phrase "this person" means you are unfamiliar with Mr Blow, and his track record in game development? You might want to look him up -- he's an interesting character and has developed some interesting and influential games.
  • 0xffff2 4y ago
    >Can I assume your use of the phrase "this person" means you are unfamiliar with Mr Blow, and his track record in game development? Not OP, but I'm fairly sure "this person" refers to the blog post author, not JB.