4 ms·

There's a game version of the Whorf hypothesis; the engine limits the kinds of games that are thinkable. Unless you are the kind of person that has shipped your

by avaer 2mo ago

There's a game version of the Whorf hypothesis; the engine limits the kinds of games that are thinkable. Unless you are the kind of person that has shipped your own engine, you probably don't even realize the thousands of little decisions that are forced on you. Which is why so many games look and play exactly the same. According to my research, Steam success is somewhat correlated with making your own engine. Novelty and standing out from the crowd are the things that sell your game. It's a lot harder to do new things if what you can think is limited by your infrastructure. Still, don't build your own engine. Build your game; the engine comes out of that.

Gooblebrai 2mo ago
> the engine limits the kinds of games that are thinkable. [...] You probably don't even realize the thousands of little decisions that are forced on you Well, if Im not aware of those decisions forced upon me. I doubt they are affecting what I think is possible to do in the engine, as I'm not aware of the limitations in the first place.
- andai 2mo ago
  The lack of awareness is the whole point of the argument.
TaLiTr 2mo ago
> the engine limits the kinds of games that are thinkable. Does anyone actually do that? Most people just sit around thinking things up, and only later are they sobered to the fact of how much work it would be to implement a niche feature that isn't a substantial part of the game. > Which is why so many games look and play exactly the same. I'd argue that 90% of that is caused by default shaders. It's why people complain about "unreal engine sheen" it's how most of the materials get set up for you if you don't care to change it. The other 9% is default character controllers for the same reasons. 1% or less is going to be caused by some unalienable quirk of the engine that can never change. > Steam success is somewhat correlated with making your own engine. Novelty and standing out from the crowd are the things that sell your game. Successful games often have novelty and stand out. But there's an aspect of survivor bias. Probably plenty of games that are novel or stand out in all the wrong ways. It's also not clear that making your own engine causes novelty or you to stand out. > It's a lot harder to do new things if what you can think is limited by your infrastructure. Again, not convinced that's the way people go. Maybe they try to implement it and it's clunky, or doesn't scale, or trashes performance. So they scale it back, rework it, or write some custom code. An engine isn't magic, any amount of code you have to write to implement a feature is less than a whole new engine. Would Balatro have been a better game if it had a completely bespoke rendering pipeline? I'd say probably not.

by avaer 2mo ago

Gooblebrai 2mo ago

> the engine limits the kinds of games that are thinkable. [...] You probably don't even realize the thousands of little decisions that are forced on you Well, if Im not aware of those decisions forced upon me. I doubt they are affecting what I think is possible to do in the engine, as I'm not aware of the limitations in the first place.

andai 2mo ago
The lack of awareness is the whole point of the argument.

TaLiTr 2mo ago

> the engine limits the kinds of games that are thinkable. Does anyone actually do that? Most people just sit around thinking things up, and only later are they sobered to the fact of how much work it would be to implement a niche feature that isn't a substantial part of the game. > Which is why so many games look and play exactly the same. I'd argue that 90% of that is caused by default shaders. It's why people complain about "unreal engine sheen" it's how most of the materials get set up for you if you don't care to change it. The other 9% is default character controllers for the same reasons. 1% or less is going to be caused by some unalienable quirk of the engine that can never change. > Steam success is somewhat correlated with making your own engine. Novelty and standing out from the crowd are the things that sell your game. Successful games often have novelty and stand out. But there's an aspect of survivor bias. Probably plenty of games that are novel or stand out in all the wrong ways. It's also not clear that making your own engine causes novelty or you to stand out. > It's a lot harder to do new things if what you can think is limited by your infrastructure. Again, not convinced that's the way people go. Maybe they try to implement it and it's clunky, or doesn't scale, or trashes performance. So they scale it back, rework it, or write some custom code. An engine isn't magic, any amount of code you have to write to implement a feature is less than a whole new engine. Would Balatro have been a better game if it had a completely bespoke rendering pipeline? I'd say probably not.