Soup Raiders goes native: What you gain by building your own game engine

adastra22

That graph isn't 13% "make their own game engine." It is 13% as "other." There are a LOT of other game engines out there. Very, very few games roll their own.

tancop

Where do you put modular engine/framework hybrids like Bevy? It owns the game loop so it's technically an engine but you can swap out just about every part of it, even rendering and window management. Tiny Glade only used the core ECS with every other part being custom.

100percentjake

Still bitterly disappointed that the upcoming sequel to Cyberpunk 2077 will no longer be on their in-house engine. There's something innately charming about the unique brand of jank that comes with doing it all in-house. See also: Skyrim/Creation Engine in general.

avaer

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.

KronisLV

I'm reminded of the story of Randy, that I watched unfold over quite a few months - he couldn't help himself but to work on new features, rewriting existing features, hacking to make his workflow better, but really struggled to release anything, like a form of bikeshedding where you are actually still productive, except what you produce doesn't seem to meaningfully get you closer to shipping at all. The videos that document the journey probably haven't gone anywhere: https://www.youtube.com/@randyprime/videos https://www.youtube.com/@randyprime2/videos If you want to make an engine and learn about making engines - make an engine. If you want to ship a game - think long and hard about whether an off-the-shelf engine wouldn't be a better investment of your time (because you wouldn't invest hundreds or thousands of hours making something bespoke and could actually make the features you need within an existing engine). I suspect that with the great FOSS and source available engines we have, like Godot, there will be plugins for msot things and folks will be able to make their own without having to start from scratch (unless they really want to), like the most competent terrain implementation for Godot so far is a plugin - https://tokisan.com/terrain3d/ Hell, maybe also contribute to lesser known engines if you feel like it: like jMonkeyEngine, Flax (it's great, like a lightweight and 3D oriented Unity / Unreal with a footprint closer to Godot and a nice C# integration), Stride and others.

smallstepforman

The thing about game engines is that 80%+ of engine developers time is spent on designing tools and a checkbox/slider for you to click. Another 15% is spent on conflits when combining featured. Less than 5% of the time is invested in actual engine features. In raw homegrown engines, you call a function to enable the feature you want. Your 5% time matches commercial engine 5% time. You dont gain much if you know what you are doing. If you dont know what you are doing, well …

poetril

I understand that making a game engine is often at odds with actually making a game, but does anyone know of good literature on building one from scratch? Ideally something like crafting interpreters but for an engine. It’s been on my list for quite a while.

iFire

This is why the custom engine over the last 6 years I've contribute to `godot engine` is more widely used and I haven't finished my game. I reject this theme, I gained but I also lost.

bashmelek

As a hobbyist, I also dislike how standardized the notion of a “game” has become. The big name engines feed into this with the biases built into them to help facilitate making these sorts of games, and then the notion of an “engine” gets similarly restricted. But a game can be any sort of joyous program.

andai

You do it because it's fun. Then you win, even if you lose! This also applies to everything else in life.

wewewedxfgdf

Game developers who find themselves writing a game engine are no longer writing a game, they are writing a demo for their game engine.

royal__

The simple reason that a lot of the games made without a custom engine don't sell is because they're simply turds. Games don't sell based on what engine they were made in. Games sell because they're good games.