[yuhe00]

With the availability of game engines, gameplay programming is actually very high-level. Most of the logic is handling some input or some collision or updating some position or timer every frame. The more complex parts of a game (collisions, physics simulation, rendering, asset management, networking, etc.) is handled by the game engine itself, so the games programmer usually only need to interface with the high-level API of these systems.

Also, games programming is HIGHLY agile. Most of the logic you implement will be thrown away. It's all about rapid prototyping and finding what is "fun". Of course, once you've found something fun you might want to build it into a solid and scalable system, but even in such a system you might want to keep the flexibility for designers to extend and add new elements as they see fit (using visual scripting!). The ability for non-programmers to be able to make gameplay changes is also an important factor.

[smaudet]

Game Engines Suck.

There, I've said it. Most 'games' are in fact interactive movies, with very little game in them. That's what Game Engines enable.

I'm vote we stop calling them Game Engines and instead call them Interactive Movie Engines.

> The more complex parts of a game (collisions, physics simulation, rendering, asset management, networking, etc.) is handled by the game engine itself,

This is and always was a Bad Idea, let me bring up a very simple example for you, a racing simulator. What sets apart an arcade from a realistic car driving sim? It's not really the graphics, or "gameplay", its the physics engine.

You might argue "oh that's just knobs on the physics engine" - maybe. But the way you handle the graphics, the whole game, even, hinges on how well you have tuned that engine. I don't care how many artists or designers you have - adding doodads to a realsitic racing sim isn't going to make it more fun. And if your arcade gameplay isn't spot on, no amount of "gameplay tweaks" is going to fix your jank arcade racing game.

Game Engines don't really make for building racing sims. They make Ok FPS or world exploration templates, but you kinda want to not even care about assets in these types of games - and they are all geared at creating assets spitting, 10000 collectible doodad dumping, absolute messes.

[echelon]

> There, I've said it. Most 'games' are in fact interactive movies, with very little game in them. That's what Game Engines enable.

While I disagree with your argument about game engines being bad for games, you bring up an interesting point. Game engines are becoming cinematic movie engines.

Right now, they're a bit sub-standard. They shouldn't be built for consumer hardware at all, but rather live in the cloud where they have access to a lot of GPU compute for rendering.

The thing they get right is the reduction in film production complexity. Less going to set, less setting up lighting, cameras, etc. Easy tweaking in post, and an almost complete inversion of the production pipeline where directors, actors, and animators can work in lock-step with one another in fast iteration.

Unreal Engine is being stretched to do film things, but it's ultimately a local optimum. We're going to see a lot of new tools emerge in this space. (I'm building one!)

In the near future, films shot on cinema cameras and glass will be in the minority of visual media produced. It's just too time consuming. It'll become an artisanal pastime that directors like Wes Anderson remain attracted to.

The really interesting thing will be what happens to studios like Disney and Netflix that bank on in-house content and IP. Once media is no longer expensive and kids at home are making Star Wars of their own, the linear content moat is gone. Franchises and major IP will probably move to difficult-to-produce (for now) mediums, such as games, since films will turn into something more closely resembling novels - a huge basket of works, a wide distribution of quality, and a very long tail of interests that are catered to.

The next decade is going to be a wild ride.