I think the best advice for making your own game is: do what you're most excited to do. Do you spend time thinking about making your own game engine? Then start making it. Be willing to change course later if it's too hard, your time will not be wasted.
I got into gamedev by messing around with making my own engine, mostly focusing on low level graphics APIs, and that knowledge transferred well when I switched to a professional game engine. I knew about shaders and such and knew I was somewhat prepared to alter the engine I was using if needed.
Or, the other way, if you start making a game in an engine and you hate it, your efforts are not wasted. The truth is like 10 or 20 thousand lines of game logic can make a lot of games, and that's really not much code to port to your own game engine compared to the rest of the engine. All the art and other assets can be ported too. Plus, if you know a professional game engine you can use it for tooling or get some good architecture ideas to use in your own engine.
So, just get moving with whatever excites you most and be willing to change course.
This gets at something I’ve thought about a lot as a software dev.
Making a game engine is a very concrete task, in that you can map out the steps and many of them are well-defined.
On the other hand “make a good game” kinda isn’t. Which I think is a big reason why coders gravitate towards the “start making an engine” route and then fall down it :)
The developers I admire and look up to a lot are the artists that fell into programming. I think they’re the best when it comes to being a successful lone / indie dev for games. Everyone notices art, but you don’t notice programming unless it goes wrong or you know the tech behind what you’re looking at.
Another way to think of this is not making a “game engine” but just “making a game”. Get rid of all the generic stuff and use some common patterns that fit the game exactly. No need to over-abstract!
> The truth is like 10 or 20 thousand lines of game logic can make a lot of games, and that's really not much code to port to your own game engine compared to the rest of the engine.
I intuitively want to agree, but on the other hand I've also seen many, many hobby/indie/etc projects deadlock when they switched engines. Or even engine versions (Unreal 4 -> 5).
I know this will get downvoted. I fully agree that if you want to make a game-engine then make one. It's fun! On the other hand, if you want to make a game, use an existing engine.
Analogies: I want to write a novel so I'll first build a typewriter. I want to film a movie so I'll first build a camera and digital editing software. I want to cook food so I'll first build a stove, pots, pans, and knives.
In all those other examples it hopefully clear, you just buy the tools you need and then make the thing the tools allow you to make. At this point, the same is true in games.
If you like making a game engine than make one. Just like if you like making knives or cameras then make them. But, making a knife is not cooking, making a camera is not making a movie, and making a game-engine is not making a game.
I also want to add, making a game-engine is easy compared to making a game. Why? Because all the things to you need are well known. You need a 2d renderer (UI), a 3d renderer (assuming you need 3d), image loaders, model loaders, sound players, music players, keyboard input, joypad input, entity systems. Etc. You build them and it seems like you're making progress and if your goal is to make a game-engine, then you are making progress. But, if your goal is to make game, you're mostly likely fooling yourself that you're making progress. Again, back to the analogies, if you're making a knife, you aren't making progress on cooking, your making progress on making a knife. If your making a camera, you aren't making progress on making a movie, you're making progress on making a camera.
What makes making a game harder than a game-engine is the list things to do for a game is unknown.
In AS3, I made a sound/music engine on top of their excellent sound API, then tacked on other things like simple graphics and then controls, so I accidentally made a game engine out of a sound/synth project.
I think maybe opposed to some of the other opinions here, making your own engine is much easier than you think and has a lot of potential upside.
On a walk today I was thinking about something specific that I think is under-discussed. Yes people bikeshed etc. but when you create your own engine you are _fiercely_ aware of _everything_ it can and can't do. As part of this, it's very easy to feel fully in command of your own toolset, and as such able to exhibit mastery over that toolset.
Granted, the scope of possibility when you start out building your own tool is narrow, but in some ways that acts as an easier onboarding to expertise instead of getting dumped into something as powerful as Unity/Unreal/Godot with little orientation and lots of edges you don't know about. In using some super-general you have to carve out your own path through its features, which is cognitive load (and time!) you don't need to worry about when you create your own.
For similar reasons I'm _also_ making my own engine. It's 2D-only engine that uses lots of modern C# features to make for rapid programming of 2D games. For the game I'm making with it to start, I'm using literally every feature of the engine, which is something I don't think I'd ever be able to say for something more general purpose.
> but when you create your own engine you are _fiercely_ aware of _everything_ it can and can't do
The problem is that if you start gamedev by making engines, then you aren't aware of what you need to do.
To give an example, if you make font rendering and looks blurry/pixelated, what now? Oh, and a simple 2D game takes 8 seconds to load, wonder why?
Meanwhile, if you have ever made a Unity game, chances are you already know the keywords "SDF" and "Texture compression", because you tore down an already big engine for optimizing your game and accidentally learned about what features a game needs.
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.
"On a walk today I was thinking about something specific that I think is under-discussed. Yes people bikeshed etc. but when you create your own engine you are _fiercely_ aware of _everything_ it can and can't do. As part of this, it's very easy to feel fully in command of your own toolset, and as such able to exhibit mastery over that toolset."
Yeah the really compelling thing to me is the knowledge building. For example what I do with my own project is that I take a look at some demo or example, let's say in Gamemaker or GDevelop and I ask myself a few questions:
a) how is the sausage made?
b) can I make the sausage and what are my ingredients?
c) if I can't make the sausage yet, what do I need in order to make the sausage?
For me this has been really the best way to build rather "deep" knowledge in this domain, as in knowing how something works under the hood (or how I think it works or at least how my version of it works) vs. knowing how to use it in Gamemaker / GDevelop.
Ps. your github could use some screenshots I think
Am I the only one who thinks the word "engine" is overused?
I've always assumed that "make a game, or make an engine" meant: if you decide to not use an engine when making your game, don't abstract it and also make an engine.
In other words, don't overengineer your game and build a generic engine when you don't need to.
Have I interpreted this wrong all these years? Or did the phrase morph because everyone thinks everything is too hard to program yourself these days?
Congrats! Game engines seem like such a gratifying pursuit that flexes every aspect of one’s skills. I just started reading Game Engine Archicture; if I can ever make the time I really want to take a crack at an engine.
At least that's a goal, a lot of people say "I want to make a game" but get stuck in the making an engine part. Which is also valid, don't get me wrong - if you enjoy it, by all means! However it's not building a game, it's building a game engine.
Anyone that wants to build an engine (or a CMS, or whatever) with the goal of making a game should try making one or more games with one or more existing engines first, if only to get a better idea of features and shortcomings. And if they really want to make games, or just the engine.
Literally that what I'm pursuing rn, I want to make my first (real) 3d game, I'm very aware of the loophole that most self-made engine game developers falls into but I genuinely found no 3d engine that suits my criteria:
* Be resources efficient (memory and cpu usage)
* Has primary 3D support
* stable
* Supports old devices (ideally embedded systems too)
* And of course be FOSS
I'm focusing on mobile, as you know mobile devices are very sensible to heating so the 1st option is a must, Godot isn't resource efficient, it heats very easily when I play one of the sample games. Regarding the second option, whilst Godot still supports gles2(which is the most widely supported api yet across old devices) it's further being pushed as second-citizent over Vulkan and looking through github no other engine checks my boxes...
If someone could direct me to an engine that checks all the boxes above I would happily try it out.
It's definitely possible to do it - for me the key is to write the game and the engine together, and only implement the bare features you need. For the first game at least, the engine and the game are essentially the same thing. Also, forget about wiring an editor, just add debug functionality to the game.
I've been really interested in things like raylib [1] and other minimal C libraries for lower-level game-engine-like capabilities. There is a widening middle ground available for developers between writing your own engine completely from scratch and using a full-featured engine like Godot, Unity, or Unreal. There was always stuff like SDL but these new minimal libraries hit a sweet spot for a lot of cases.
Yup, raylib is great. Sokol is another solid choice for the low level bits - that's what my engine is built with and it's excellent (at least for indie level games).
I'm currently using raylib and Odin to build a 2D platformer for my twins. I built out a PoC with a couple of levels. Now I'm working my way through a level editor. It has completely reinvigorated my passion for programming.
For smaller games, there's some charm in not making a game engine, and not using one either, but just writing the game, sure this falls apart easily, if you find yourself needing something you're not able/willing to make from scratch, but a lot of very entertaining stuff can be made by just programming the game rather than trying to create an elegant api for your engine, or trying to learn and wrangle an exisiting engine into submission.
Very cool to see someone actually making a game in their hobby engine!
Regarding the asset prefetching, you mention that they are loaded lazily. Maybe I'm misunderstanding but to me prefetching and lazy loading are the opposite (i.e. you would prefetch during a loading screen in order to avoid loading things on demand since it could affect the game loop). Could you elaborate?
The prefetching works like this: a list of assets is provided, and in each main loop iteration, the engine opens and loads a single one into memory (an unordered map of shared pointers). It would be more effective in a longer game, where as the player moves, the assets are already being prepared for use.
There’s also a mechanism to collect and remove unused assets from memory.
I've been cranking on a 2D engine for over 4 years and have put thousands of hours of work into it.
My summary:
If you want to write a game, just write a game. Don't start with your own engine since this will suck all your time and you'll end up spending 90% on engine and very little getting the game game done. Especially so in the beginning when you have no features and doing anything in the game requires engine work.
If you choose to create your own engine it's a compelling and fantastic domain where problems come in all shapes and sizes and you can and get to work with physics, maths, linear algebra, audio, rendering, graphics APIs, system level programming, most likely native programming AND scripting, game content, technical art etc.
But finally the real work is not the engine but the tooling and the editor around the engine.
If (when) you rely on free assets from (for example opengameart) you can expect no consistency. Not just the art style but just the technical part too, like your models are all inconsistent in shapes and sizes and axis, 2D content such as textures are by default without any meta data etc. So you really need to create a ton of tooling so that you can have sensible workflows and you can extract and consume the usable and interesting parts of any content package easily.
This inevitably leads to the concept of "editor" which easily comes with a ton of work by itself that has nothing to do with game or game engine per se. For example the concept of "Project", windows, resource management, basic editing functionality for creating content, undo/redo/ etc. A lot of this is not really related to the game or the engine in anyway but you really sort of "must have it" if you want to create something that is actually usable.
The feature creep is real! But once you get the over a lot of the boiler plate and you can actually use your own editor to stuff content into your own engine and have it running it's really a nice feeling even if nobody else cares!
On the technical side my advice is really to be able to do first principles type of thinking. It's of utmost importance to be able to break things apart into self contained features and pieces that the game can then combine to create bigger constructs.
If you can have your materials scroll textures vertically, when you combine that with shapes that are layered and place textures onto those shapes that scroll at various multiples of your "characters" speed then you've just created "parallax scrolling" essentially.
I often hear the advice to "make games, not game engines", and it's refreshing to hear it from someone who is actually working on an engine themselves, because usually when I hear this advice it's from devs who use Unity/Godot/Unreal, and the implication I get is that if you're not using one of those engines, you're wasting your time and won't ever make a game.
But I'd say there's a middle ground between using an existing engine and making your own general-purpose engine from scratch. I've been making a 2D RTS using C++/SDL, and it's taken me longer to write it this way than if I had used an existing engine, but in only a few months I've reached the point where I have a prototype and have had multiple playtests and am iterating the prototype based on feedback from those playtests.
So, while the advice "make games, not game engines" is still definitely true, it doesn't mean that if you code "from scratch" that your game will necessarily be a long 4-year engine project (unless you want it to be!). The trick is to keep the code specific to the game you're working on and to avoid the urge to abstract everything / make everything general-purpose.
For me, a great middle ground is building an engine similar to fantasy consoles (PICO-8, TIC-80, etc.)
This type of project is small enough to plan all the elements before you start (which helps to stick to the design and therefore to avoid feature creep). Yet, it is still complex enough to provide entertainment and challenge.
This approach also has the advantage – at least it is an advantage in the case of side projects – that you can see the results of your work quite quickly.
I'm working on such a project myself, and it is a great experience. Although to tell the truth, it is more of a "game creation kit" than an engine.
This is exactly why I ended up going for Godot with my own hobby game. I have made a lot of progress on a custom game engine in the past without actually having a game to make in mind. It always gets to the point where you have to start making decisions about the tooling, and that becomes your main focus.
No disrespect or put downs of anyone trying to do their own thing, but Godot is a really great engine and is open source. It's kind of miracle that we live in a world where there is a viable open source engine for commercial grade 2d games and the whole thing is MIT licensed.
I think the trap people fall into is to have things be overly specific in the name of optimization they never get to achieving anyway.
For instance, I find you can get massive mileage by declaring “(almost) everything is instanced”, then you batch it, forget it, move on. There are similar shortcuts to be made with physics and so on.
The close to ideal engine, in terms of approaches to problems, was LittleBigPlanet. That was a small team that were really good, but crucially they had the right way to frame the problems so as to constrain the emergent complexity of the result.
I want to write a slot machine “game” for a custom slot machine I’ve built using a piece of MDF, a 32” LCD, and a Linux single board computer.
I haven’t found much information on how to write a game in this style with existing engines. Any advice or resources you would point a noob too? I am a software engineer but not a game programmer.
It doesn’t have to be so good as a real slot machine (regulations and such) but I do want to follow the rules as best I can. I may not use a real hardware RNG.
Honestly more people should try it before they knock it. Programming a game from scratch is not rocket science. It takes some work to get to finished game but sometimes the journey is what people care about and want to master. No need to always be optimizing for the end result.
I make stuff with wood. I don’t use power tools. I use hand tools. Because I like doing it that way.
Conventional wisdom dictates; make a game or make an engine. If you're making a serious effort at actually delivering a game, then you may want to use an existing engine. However it's also a nice challenge to write an engine of your own. And perhaps some true legends can actually do both - just look at Animal Well.
The author made this game for his son. I think this qualifies more as a hobby/side project than a serious effort at delivering a marketable game. In the hobby case I think the conventional wisdom no longer applies. That puts this sort of project in line with folks building hot rods or restoring classic cars right down to the last bolt. Rebuilding a car's engine is a similar exercise which rarely makes commercial sense but can be an absolute joy for the hobbyist mechanic!
It's always worth remembering that when people suggest not writing an engine the sentiment is usually "Don't try to write a Unity/Unreal/Godot equivalent".
This is very reasonable advice. Those tools are software behemoths, by design, because they have to account for all possible use cases and give people a way of opting in to any possible combination of provided features, along with providing various abstractions (scene hierarchy, gameplay scripting, graphics API abstraction, materials, VFX, animation state trees, etc., the list is seemingly endless) as they need to support making essentially any kind of game.
And not only are they software behemoths, they also represent a huge amount of mindshare in the form of documentation, support, community, customer-provided content, (marketplace assets) and so on.
If you're making a game and you know what your requirements are up front, it's possible you just don't need most of what the engine provides.
If you don't need to support multiple graphics APIs, you can get away with just using the specific API yourself (and then you don't need a different shading language). If you don't need complex VFX you might not need a VFX graph. If your rendering code is closer to your gameplay code you don't need a separate gameplay scripting system, you could actually write your gameplay code in the same language and build them together. Don't need rigid body simulation? Great! Throw that away. Don't need RVTs? Goodbye. And so on.
That doesn't mean throwing away some engine-like structure, you'll almost certainly still end up with some representation of a scene, but if your requirements are minimal you can get away without most of what's in the above tools.
And there's always the middle ground (that seems to get forgotten). Open source rendering libraries such as Ogre integrated into your own program, such that your game stops being a completely isolated component that sits on top of the engine and is regular code integrated with rendering (and so on), while being a more cohesive whole.
Of course, if you need the features in Unity or Unreal and you don't have five years to burn then maybe you should just use them after all.
Here is what I dictate: this is fucking stupid and I'm tired of seeing this nonsense parroted.
Working on your own engine gives you a level of understanding that cannot otherwise be obtained. It's like writing your own OS. This is very much a worthwhile endeavour. People should be encouraged to write their own crap, even if they don't end up using it on the job or whatever (whoever the fuck said this was the only metric for deciding what to work on?) because of the level of insight it provides.
Generic engines like UE5 and Unity break down both in terms of functionality and performance the moment you do something they are not intended to do. They are also an overkill for a project of the scale shared here. From an engineering perspective, it's absolutely ridiculous to use an engine for this project.
So please stop parroting this nonsense. Use your goddamn brain to form opinions. There isn't an off-the-shelf engine for that.
[+] [-] Buttons840|1 year ago|reply
I got into gamedev by messing around with making my own engine, mostly focusing on low level graphics APIs, and that knowledge transferred well when I switched to a professional game engine. I knew about shaders and such and knew I was somewhat prepared to alter the engine I was using if needed.
Or, the other way, if you start making a game in an engine and you hate it, your efforts are not wasted. The truth is like 10 or 20 thousand lines of game logic can make a lot of games, and that's really not much code to port to your own game engine compared to the rest of the engine. All the art and other assets can be ported too. Plus, if you know a professional game engine you can use it for tooling or get some good architecture ideas to use in your own engine.
So, just get moving with whatever excites you most and be willing to change course.
[+] [-] Fr0styMatt88|1 year ago|reply
Making a game engine is a very concrete task, in that you can map out the steps and many of them are well-defined.
On the other hand “make a good game” kinda isn’t. Which I think is a big reason why coders gravitate towards the “start making an engine” route and then fall down it :)
The developers I admire and look up to a lot are the artists that fell into programming. I think they’re the best when it comes to being a successful lone / indie dev for games. Everyone notices art, but you don’t notice programming unless it goes wrong or you know the tech behind what you’re looking at.
[+] [-] stroupwaffle|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] fpgaminer|1 year ago|reply
I intuitively want to agree, but on the other hand I've also seen many, many hobby/indie/etc projects deadlock when they switched engines. Or even engine versions (Unreal 4 -> 5).
[+] [-] nox101|1 year ago|reply
Analogies: I want to write a novel so I'll first build a typewriter. I want to film a movie so I'll first build a camera and digital editing software. I want to cook food so I'll first build a stove, pots, pans, and knives.
In all those other examples it hopefully clear, you just buy the tools you need and then make the thing the tools allow you to make. At this point, the same is true in games.
If you like making a game engine than make one. Just like if you like making knives or cameras then make them. But, making a knife is not cooking, making a camera is not making a movie, and making a game-engine is not making a game.
I also want to add, making a game-engine is easy compared to making a game. Why? Because all the things to you need are well known. You need a 2d renderer (UI), a 3d renderer (assuming you need 3d), image loaders, model loaders, sound players, music players, keyboard input, joypad input, entity systems. Etc. You build them and it seems like you're making progress and if your goal is to make a game-engine, then you are making progress. But, if your goal is to make game, you're mostly likely fooling yourself that you're making progress. Again, back to the analogies, if you're making a knife, you aren't making progress on cooking, your making progress on making a knife. If your making a camera, you aren't making progress on making a movie, you're making progress on making a camera.
What makes making a game harder than a game-engine is the list things to do for a game is unknown.
[+] [-] geepytee|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] yawnxyz|1 year ago|reply
Good ole days of AS3, still ahead of their time.
Really wish there was an AS3 WASM or something
[+] [-] kkukshtel|1 year ago|reply
On a walk today I was thinking about something specific that I think is under-discussed. Yes people bikeshed etc. but when you create your own engine you are _fiercely_ aware of _everything_ it can and can't do. As part of this, it's very easy to feel fully in command of your own toolset, and as such able to exhibit mastery over that toolset.
Granted, the scope of possibility when you start out building your own tool is narrow, but in some ways that acts as an easier onboarding to expertise instead of getting dumped into something as powerful as Unity/Unreal/Godot with little orientation and lots of edges you don't know about. In using some super-general you have to carve out your own path through its features, which is cognitive load (and time!) you don't need to worry about when you create your own.
For similar reasons I'm _also_ making my own engine. It's 2D-only engine that uses lots of modern C# features to make for rapid programming of 2D games. For the game I'm making with it to start, I'm using literally every feature of the engine, which is something I don't think I'd ever be able to say for something more general purpose.
For anyone interested: https://github.com/zinc-framework
[+] [-] FragmentShader|1 year ago|reply
The problem is that if you start gamedev by making engines, then you aren't aware of what you need to do.
To give an example, if you make font rendering and looks blurry/pixelated, what now? Oh, and a simple 2D game takes 8 seconds to load, wonder why?
Meanwhile, if you have ever made a Unity game, chances are you already know the keywords "SDF" and "Texture compression", because you tore down an already big engine for optimizing your game and accidentally learned about what features a game needs.
[+] [-] adamrezich|1 year ago|reply
“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.
[+] [-] samiv|1 year ago|reply
Yeah the really compelling thing to me is the knowledge building. For example what I do with my own project is that I take a look at some demo or example, let's say in Gamemaker or GDevelop and I ask myself a few questions:
For me this has been really the best way to build rather "deep" knowledge in this domain, as in knowing how something works under the hood (or how I think it works or at least how my version of it works) vs. knowing how to use it in Gamemaker / GDevelop.Ps. your github could use some screenshots I think
[+] [-] bcrosby95|1 year ago|reply
I've always assumed that "make a game, or make an engine" meant: if you decide to not use an engine when making your game, don't abstract it and also make an engine.
In other words, don't overengineer your game and build a generic engine when you don't need to.
Have I interpreted this wrong all these years? Or did the phrase morph because everyone thinks everything is too hard to program yourself these days?
[+] [-] braden-lk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] slmjkdbtl|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|1 year ago|reply
Anyone that wants to build an engine (or a CMS, or whatever) with the goal of making a game should try making one or more games with one or more existing engines first, if only to get a better idea of features and shortcomings. And if they really want to make games, or just the engine.
[+] [-] flykespice|1 year ago|reply
* Be resources efficient (memory and cpu usage)
* Has primary 3D support
* stable
* Supports old devices (ideally embedded systems too)
* And of course be FOSS
I'm focusing on mobile, as you know mobile devices are very sensible to heating so the 1st option is a must, Godot isn't resource efficient, it heats very easily when I play one of the sample games. Regarding the second option, whilst Godot still supports gles2(which is the most widely supported api yet across old devices) it's further being pushed as second-citizent over Vulkan and looking through github no other engine checks my boxes...
If someone could direct me to an engine that checks all the boxes above I would happily try it out.
[+] [-] shepherdjerred|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] wilberton|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 01HNNWZ0MV43FF|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jedberg|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zoogeny|1 year ago|reply
1. https://www.raylib.com/
[+] [-] wilberton|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] scruple|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dusted|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] litenboll|1 year ago|reply
Regarding the asset prefetching, you mention that they are loaded lazily. Maybe I'm misunderstanding but to me prefetching and lazy loading are the opposite (i.e. you would prefetch during a loading screen in order to avoid loading things on demand since it could affect the game loop). Could you elaborate?
[+] [-] delduca|1 year ago|reply
There’s also a mechanism to collect and remove unused assets from memory.
[+] [-] samiv|1 year ago|reply
I've been cranking on a 2D engine for over 4 years and have put thousands of hours of work into it.
My summary:
If you want to write a game, just write a game. Don't start with your own engine since this will suck all your time and you'll end up spending 90% on engine and very little getting the game game done. Especially so in the beginning when you have no features and doing anything in the game requires engine work.
If you choose to create your own engine it's a compelling and fantastic domain where problems come in all shapes and sizes and you can and get to work with physics, maths, linear algebra, audio, rendering, graphics APIs, system level programming, most likely native programming AND scripting, game content, technical art etc.
But finally the real work is not the engine but the tooling and the editor around the engine.
If (when) you rely on free assets from (for example opengameart) you can expect no consistency. Not just the art style but just the technical part too, like your models are all inconsistent in shapes and sizes and axis, 2D content such as textures are by default without any meta data etc. So you really need to create a ton of tooling so that you can have sensible workflows and you can extract and consume the usable and interesting parts of any content package easily.
This inevitably leads to the concept of "editor" which easily comes with a ton of work by itself that has nothing to do with game or game engine per se. For example the concept of "Project", windows, resource management, basic editing functionality for creating content, undo/redo/ etc. A lot of this is not really related to the game or the engine in anyway but you really sort of "must have it" if you want to create something that is actually usable.
The feature creep is real! But once you get the over a lot of the boiler plate and you can actually use your own editor to stuff content into your own engine and have it running it's really a nice feeling even if nobody else cares!
On the technical side my advice is really to be able to do first principles type of thinking. It's of utmost importance to be able to break things apart into self contained features and pieces that the game can then combine to create bigger constructs.
If you can have your materials scroll textures vertically, when you combine that with shapes that are layered and place textures onto those shapes that scroll at various multiples of your "characters" speed then you've just created "parallax scrolling" essentially.
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https://github.com/ensisoft/detonator
[+] [-] matthewkayin|1 year ago|reply
But I'd say there's a middle ground between using an existing engine and making your own general-purpose engine from scratch. I've been making a 2D RTS using C++/SDL, and it's taken me longer to write it this way than if I had used an existing engine, but in only a few months I've reached the point where I have a prototype and have had multiple playtests and am iterating the prototype based on feedback from those playtests.
So, while the advice "make games, not game engines" is still definitely true, it doesn't mean that if you code "from scratch" that your game will necessarily be a long 4-year engine project (unless you want it to be!). The trick is to keep the code specific to the game you're working on and to avoid the urge to abstract everything / make everything general-purpose.
[+] [-] Vedor|1 year ago|reply
This type of project is small enough to plan all the elements before you start (which helps to stick to the design and therefore to avoid feature creep). Yet, it is still complex enough to provide entertainment and challenge.
This approach also has the advantage – at least it is an advantage in the case of side projects – that you can see the results of your work quite quickly.
I'm working on such a project myself, and it is a great experience. Although to tell the truth, it is more of a "game creation kit" than an engine.
[+] [-] GabeIsko|1 year ago|reply
No disrespect or put downs of anyone trying to do their own thing, but Godot is a really great engine and is open source. It's kind of miracle that we live in a world where there is a viable open source engine for commercial grade 2d games and the whole thing is MIT licensed.
[+] [-] fidotron|1 year ago|reply
For instance, I find you can get massive mileage by declaring “(almost) everything is instanced”, then you batch it, forget it, move on. There are similar shortcuts to be made with physics and so on.
The close to ideal engine, in terms of approaches to problems, was LittleBigPlanet. That was a small team that were really good, but crucially they had the right way to frame the problems so as to constrain the emergent complexity of the result.
[+] [-] codazoda|1 year ago|reply
I haven’t found much information on how to write a game in this style with existing engines. Any advice or resources you would point a noob too? I am a software engineer but not a game programmer.
It doesn’t have to be so good as a real slot machine (regulations and such) but I do want to follow the rules as best I can. I may not use a real hardware RNG.
[+] [-] chainwax|1 year ago|reply
In more ways than one
[+] [-] delduca|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] emanuele-em|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] delduca|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pmontra|1 year ago|reply
Examples of what I expect:
or a more convoluted[+] [-] PretzelPirate|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] delduca|1 year ago|reply
My next step is to work on collision and physics; maybe I’ll use something like Box2D.
[+] [-] darepublic|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tony-allan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] eternityforest|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] agentultra|1 year ago|reply
Honestly more people should try it before they knock it. Programming a game from scratch is not rocket science. It takes some work to get to finished game but sometimes the journey is what people care about and want to master. No need to always be optimizing for the end result.
I make stuff with wood. I don’t use power tools. I use hand tools. Because I like doing it that way.
Hope your kid has fun playing the game!
[+] [-] onikolas7|1 year ago|reply
https://nik-os.com/agl/00_intro.html
[+] [-] ashleyn|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] chongli|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sunrunner|1 year ago|reply
This is very reasonable advice. Those tools are software behemoths, by design, because they have to account for all possible use cases and give people a way of opting in to any possible combination of provided features, along with providing various abstractions (scene hierarchy, gameplay scripting, graphics API abstraction, materials, VFX, animation state trees, etc., the list is seemingly endless) as they need to support making essentially any kind of game.
And not only are they software behemoths, they also represent a huge amount of mindshare in the form of documentation, support, community, customer-provided content, (marketplace assets) and so on.
If you're making a game and you know what your requirements are up front, it's possible you just don't need most of what the engine provides.
If you don't need to support multiple graphics APIs, you can get away with just using the specific API yourself (and then you don't need a different shading language). If you don't need complex VFX you might not need a VFX graph. If your rendering code is closer to your gameplay code you don't need a separate gameplay scripting system, you could actually write your gameplay code in the same language and build them together. Don't need rigid body simulation? Great! Throw that away. Don't need RVTs? Goodbye. And so on.
That doesn't mean throwing away some engine-like structure, you'll almost certainly still end up with some representation of a scene, but if your requirements are minimal you can get away without most of what's in the above tools.
And there's always the middle ground (that seems to get forgotten). Open source rendering libraries such as Ogre integrated into your own program, such that your game stops being a completely isolated component that sits on top of the engine and is regular code integrated with rendering (and so on), while being a more cohesive whole.
Of course, if you need the features in Unity or Unreal and you don't have five years to burn then maybe you should just use them after all.
[+] [-] delduca|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] yazzku|1 year ago|reply
Working on your own engine gives you a level of understanding that cannot otherwise be obtained. It's like writing your own OS. This is very much a worthwhile endeavour. People should be encouraged to write their own crap, even if they don't end up using it on the job or whatever (whoever the fuck said this was the only metric for deciding what to work on?) because of the level of insight it provides.
Generic engines like UE5 and Unity break down both in terms of functionality and performance the moment you do something they are not intended to do. They are also an overkill for a project of the scale shared here. From an engineering perspective, it's absolutely ridiculous to use an engine for this project.
So please stop parroting this nonsense. Use your goddamn brain to form opinions. There isn't an off-the-shelf engine for that.