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After trying to evangelize this exact mindset to people in the wake of the recent Godot drama, I've given up (or not, judging by my posts here…). Most people ar

After trying to evangelize this exact mindset to people in the wake of the recent Godot drama, I've given up (or not, judging by my posts here…). Most people aren't willing to even investigate how easy it is to make “a game engine”, because the term “game engine” has been mythologized (due to Unity, Godot, etc.) into being this thing that's for all practical purposes impossible for the average programmer to build. “As a solo developer, either you work on building an engine, or you work on building a game, but if you're going to do the former, then you'll never complete the latter,” they say (in this very comments section, even). Well, sure… if by “game engine” you mean “general-purpose super-generic game engine,” and not “the smallest set of things absolutely necessary to transmute the idea I have in my head into playable form on this supercomputer I'm sitting in front of.” I don't really get it—I started programming games by learning Game Maker in the early 00s. By the time I was ready to move onto something more like “real game development” (C#/XNA), I was more than eager to structure things more according to how I wanted for whatever given project I was working on, rather than trying to cram my ideas into a somebody-else's-engine-shaped hole. But the freely-downloadable general-purpose game engines available these days, with their innumerable layers of wholly-unnecessary overly-generalized one-size-fits-all abstractions have gotten most people who use them to never even consider even imagining doing things in any way other than the way they're now used to doing them, using their tool of choice. They're more than happy to settle with thinking about game design purely in terms of whatever high-level primitives are exposed by their preferred engine, rather than even consider even imagining what it would be like to have complete control over how their game logic is organized and executed. Why simply define structs and make arrays of struct instances and iterate over them, when you could make a byzantine web of Nodes/GameObjects in the engine-provided scene graph? I guess that's how indie “game developers” these days have been trained to think. And it's crazy because compared to only a couple short decades ago, there's more information and resources available out there on the Web for free, that anyone can read and use to make building something “from scratch” (where “from scratch” means “using open-source libraries to do the parts you don't want to learn more about for the time being, such as rendering”) easier than it ever has been before! You can use something like SDL or Raylib to “sketch out” a gameplay prototype in shockingly few lines of code, then refactor everything so that all library calls are wrapped in function calls more suited to your use case, and then, later, if you want, you can replace those library calls with your own code! It's not difficult to do at all, but I think there's just some level of comfort people take in having a GUI editor for their “game engine” that they can open a blank project in and start clicking around to make things happen on the screen, compared to staring at a blank source code file and figuring out where to go from there. The ever-decreasing baseline level of curiosity and hacker-thinking in younger programmers continues to both baffle and depress me.

alstonite 2y ago
I pretty wholeheartedly disagree with this entire sentiment. For some people making a game engine isn't a monumental task, but implying that it's easy seems like an out-of-touch sentiment. There are many people who love making games but who aren't software devs that are enabled to make whatever they dream up via by the plug and play nature of game engines.
- adamrezich 2y ago
  Have you ever tried to “make your own game engine” such that you can opine on this from a place of experience? General-purpose game engines like Unity and Godot are “plug-and-play” for only a small percentage of your game's development cycle—at some point, unless you're making an extremely trivial game, you're going to end up “fighting the engine” to make it do the thing you want it to do at some point or another—typically much more than once. If you weren't relying on someone else's underlying game engine substrate to build your game upon, then you would never encounter something like this. It would be entirely upon you to restructure your own underlying game engine substrate that you've built in order to build your game upon. You would know what each part of the machinery is doing, because you built it—you wouldn't have to guess and check and dive deep into documentation and forum threads and Discord channels just to try to figure out the optimal way to beat the engine into submission to do the thing you're trying to make it do. Have you seen the Raylib examples[0], such as the “2D platformer camera” example [1] (playable from the examples webpage)? It's really not a lot of code at all to get a basic playable game going—then from there, you just make more structs, store struct instances in arrays, and loop through the arrays to do 99% of the things you want a “game engine” to do that aren't covered by Raylib library functions. If you made a 2D platformer by starting from that example instead of using something like Unity or Godot, and do as I said above and wrap all Raylib library function calls in your own functions, then, in the absolute worst case, tomorrow you wake up and find out that Raylib has, for some reason, gone all “Our Machinery”[2] and deleted its public source repositories and informed you that you're legally obligated to delete all Raylib code on your machine. Not a problem—just switch to SDL or SFML or bgfx (for just the graphics) or something similar, spend a couple hours replacing the library function calls in your code, and you're good to go! You maintain complete ownership over the vast bulk of your game's code, because you wrote it yourself, except for a few library calls which can be easily replaced with something else. This is a much better situation to be in, compared to e.g. the Unity fiasco of last year! > There are many people who love making games but who aren't software devs This idea still baffles me—why do people try to make video games while abstaining from learning anything at all about software development? Like there's nothing wrong with using higher-level tools as a means of learning the very basics of the craft—that's how I started out, too. But wanting to learn a high-level tool and then stopping there and learning nothing more is like wanting to be an artist but never learning any art fundamentals and using an AI generator instead.[3] Video game development as a whole is extremely difficult, and a craft that should either be taken remotely seriously (especially if you wish to self-describe as a “game developer”!!), or taken extremely casually. If you want to take it extremely casually, then by all means continue to refrain from engaging with even baseline software development knowledge and principles. But if you want to take it seriously, because, for example, you wish to sell the software you've made to other people so they can run it on their computers, then really, making a “game engine” is the least of your concerns as a game developer. Actually figuring out the game's design is much more difficult and time-consuming! [0] https://www.raylib.com/examples.html https://www.raylib.com/examples.html [1] https://github.com/raysan5/raylib/blob/master/examples/core/core_2d_camera_platformer.c https://github.com/raysan5/raylib/blob/master/examples/core/... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/wd4qoh/our_machinery_extensible_engine_made_in_c_just/ https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/wd4qoh/our_machine... [3] Surely we all agree that someone whose idea of “creating art” is “learning how to best write a prompt for an AI art generator”, self-describing as an “artist”, weakens the term and is offensive to those who put untold amounts of time and effort into truly learning their craft—why should game development be any different?

alstonite 2y ago

I pretty wholeheartedly disagree with this entire sentiment. For some people making a game engine isn't a monumental task, but implying that it's easy seems like an out-of-touch sentiment. There are many people who love making games but who aren't software devs that are enabled to make whatever they dream up via by the plug and play nature of game engines.

adamrezich 2y ago
Have you ever tried to “make your own game engine” such that you can opine on this from a place of experience? General-purpose game engines like Unity and Godot are “plug-and-play” for only a small percentage of your game's development cycle—at some point, unless you're making an extremely trivial game, you're going to end up “fighting the engine” to make it do the thing you want it to do at some point or another—typically much more than once. If you weren't relying on someone else's underlying game engine substrate to build your game upon, then you would never encounter something like this. It would be entirely upon you to restructure your own underlying game engine substrate that you've built in order to build your game upon. You would know what each part of the machinery is doing, because you built it—you wouldn't have to guess and check and dive deep into documentation and forum threads and Discord channels just to try to figure out the optimal way to beat the engine into submission to do the thing you're trying to make it do. Have you seen the Raylib examples[0], such as the “2D platformer camera” example [1] (playable from the examples webpage)? It's really not a lot of code at all to get a basic playable game going—then from there, you just make more structs, store struct instances in arrays, and loop through the arrays to do 99% of the things you want a “game engine” to do that aren't covered by Raylib library functions. If you made a 2D platformer by starting from that example instead of using something like Unity or Godot, and do as I said above and wrap all Raylib library function calls in your own functions, then, in the absolute worst case, tomorrow you wake up and find out that Raylib has, for some reason, gone all “Our Machinery”[2] and deleted its public source repositories and informed you that you're legally obligated to delete all Raylib code on your machine. Not a problem—just switch to SDL or SFML or bgfx (for just the graphics) or something similar, spend a couple hours replacing the library function calls in your code, and you're good to go! You maintain complete ownership over the vast bulk of your game's code, because you wrote it yourself, except for a few library calls which can be easily replaced with something else. This is a much better situation to be in, compared to e.g. the Unity fiasco of last year! > There are many people who love making games but who aren't software devs This idea still baffles me—why do people try to make video games while abstaining from learning anything at all about software development? Like there's nothing wrong with using higher-level tools as a means of learning the very basics of the craft—that's how I started out, too. But wanting to learn a high-level tool and then stopping there and learning nothing more is like wanting to be an artist but never learning any art fundamentals and using an AI generator instead.[3] Video game development as a whole is extremely difficult, and a craft that should either be taken remotely seriously (especially if you wish to self-describe as a “game developer”!!), or taken extremely casually. If you want to take it extremely casually, then by all means continue to refrain from engaging with even baseline software development knowledge and principles. But if you want to take it seriously, because, for example, you wish to sell the software you've made to other people so they can run it on their computers, then really, making a “game engine” is the least of your concerns as a game developer. Actually figuring out the game's design is much more difficult and time-consuming! [0] https://www.raylib.com/examples.html https://www.raylib.com/examples.html [1] https://github.com/raysan5/raylib/blob/master/examples/core/core_2d_camera_platformer.c https://github.com/raysan5/raylib/blob/master/examples/core/... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/wd4qoh/our_machinery_extensible_engine_made_in_c_just/ https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/wd4qoh/our_machine... [3] Surely we all agree that someone whose idea of “creating art” is “learning how to best write a prompt for an AI art generator”, self-describing as an “artist”, weakens the term and is offensive to those who put untold amounts of time and effort into truly learning their craft—why should game development be any different?