[alstonite]

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.

[kitd]

I'm not a game dev, but I had a lot of fun making an ECS system by following ideas in an article I found (and which I have now annoyingly lost).

It's a very educational exercise that any dev would benefit from, game dev or not.

[adamrezich]

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

[1] https://github.com/raysan5/raylib/blob/master/examples/core/...

[2] 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?

[_gabe_]

You seem to be very intent on insisting that anyone can make a game engine (which I mostly agree with). But, it’s not easy, even when you use a pre-existing framework like Raylib. I’ve used frameworks like Monogame, I’ve used bare metal C++ and OpenGL, I’ve used the HTML canvas and JavaScript, I’ve built physics engines and used physics engines like Box2D or Havok. What I’m trying to say is I’ve done a lot of game engine-y stuff at various levels of the stack.

I’ve _also_ used Godot, Unity and Unreal. There’s a tremendous difference. I just started learning Godot a week ago and I already have the core game loop practically done in a new RPG. Sure I could’ve done the same thing using C++ and OpenGL (or Raylib or something), but I would be missing out on a lot of useful things that _just work_. Godot’s BBCode text labels are amazing and give my dialogue boxes a whole bunch of character out of the box. The tilemap editor allows me to just build my levels without having to build an editor first. The lighting system can add a ton of visual polish with very little effort on my part.

I’ve also dabbled in VR games with Unreal. And I’ve tried making some simple 3D games in Unity. Is this all possible without those engines? Yea. Would I have been able to experiment with the kinds of tech I got to play with if I made it all myself from scratch? I doubt it (not because I couldn’t do it, I just don’t have the time).

Another thing to consider is porting your game to different platforms! There’s a whole lot of variability in what kind of support you’ll get for that with something you made yourself or a framework like Raylib.

Anyways, from someone who has experienced both sides of the coin, you’ll end up fighting with the engine either way ;) There’s nothing wrong with using a general purpose engine.

[MattRix]

The idea that people who use game engines are at all equivalent to AI art prompters is ridiculous. What you’re doing is being like a painter who says “real painters mix their own pigments”. It’s unnecessary gatekeeping.

[d0100]

I program daily

At night I don't want to slog away implementing Foo and extending Bar

Unity is already a lot of programming to do any simple game mechanic, and you still have animation, modeling, art, lighting, shaders, sound...

I can't wait for AI to get to a point where I can tell it to "get look and feel from X game, mechanics from Y MOBA, multiplayer server" and get code good enough for an MVP

Games are for playing, code is an unfortunate side effect

[raincole]

> 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

It's more like an artist never learning the chemistry that makes pigments and watercolor work.

Sorry, comparing scripting in Unity/Godot and prompting in Stable Diffusion is just ridiculous.