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When I started as a game developer making your own engine was required. In fact I was at the meetings when Epic and Id suggested to Activision use their 3D eng

When I started as a game developer making your own engine was required. In fact I was at the meetings when Epic and Id suggested to Activision use their 3D engine instead of rolling their own-- which was a new idea. (As an aside -- seeing the pre-release editor for Unreal was eye opening at that time) The business (or hobby) has gone from depending on people having the technical skill to make a game being the most important thing to having the marketing skill to find an audience as the most important thing.

nonrandomstring 2y ago
Kinda just wanted to say the same thing. When I taught in London I gave the physics and sound part of a "game design" course. The undergrads built their own game engine over three years and used it to deliver their final project. They started out with pong and ended up with a full 3D framework with lighting, sound, physics, collisions and object managers. They had to sit through lectures on space partitions, quaternions, graph theory, ray tracing, audio DSP... those kids really went through the mill. I guess a lot of those students went on to do great things, but around 2015 I noticed a shift where; 1) We couldn't get the recruits with the right maths backgrounds any more. The kids just wanted to do more aesthetic design stuff. 2) Game companies seemed less interested in hiring them. I put that down to a slump in the market, but looking back; the age of the programmer-developer was over. Games engines became like commercial operating systems. You either used Unreal or Unity and the closest to programming you got was with middleware (blueprint and the like) which was mostly template dataflow.
- georgeecollins 2y ago
  As a publisher you would prefer to work with people who don't make their own engines. As a developer you are kind of wary of the guy who wants to write his own renderer. That person is going to be bored scripting. Plus, twenty five years ago a game developer could afford to hire the person with the chops to right a renderer. We used to be able to get people from Cal Tech rolling off aerospace companies after the cold war. Now people with those skills are way too expensive to hire.
  - nonrandomstring 2y ago
    > As a developer you are kind of wary of the guy who wants to write his own renderer. Yeah that has resonance here I'm sure. Unless you're in the business of developing game engines, but competition made that a very small space. Oh well, they learned a lot. It'll come in useful eventually.

nonrandomstring 2y ago

Kinda just wanted to say the same thing. When I taught in London I gave the physics and sound part of a "game design" course. The undergrads built their own game engine over three years and used it to deliver their final project. They started out with pong and ended up with a full 3D framework with lighting, sound, physics, collisions and object managers. They had to sit through lectures on space partitions, quaternions, graph theory, ray tracing, audio DSP... those kids really went through the mill. I guess a lot of those students went on to do great things, but around 2015 I noticed a shift where; 1) We couldn't get the recruits with the right maths backgrounds any more. The kids just wanted to do more aesthetic design stuff. 2) Game companies seemed less interested in hiring them. I put that down to a slump in the market, but looking back; the age of the programmer-developer was over. Games engines became like commercial operating systems. You either used Unreal or Unity and the closest to programming you got was with middleware (blueprint and the like) which was mostly template dataflow.

georgeecollins 2y ago
As a publisher you would prefer to work with people who don't make their own engines. As a developer you are kind of wary of the guy who wants to write his own renderer. That person is going to be bored scripting. Plus, twenty five years ago a game developer could afford to hire the person with the chops to right a renderer. We used to be able to get people from Cal Tech rolling off aerospace companies after the cold war. Now people with those skills are way too expensive to hire.
- nonrandomstring 2y ago
  > As a developer you are kind of wary of the guy who wants to write his own renderer. Yeah that has resonance here I'm sure. Unless you're in the business of developing game engines, but competition made that a very small space. Oh well, they learned a lot. It'll come in useful eventually.