Comment by mjr00
4 months ago
> And yet, if making your own game engine makes it intellectually stimulating enough to actually make and ship a game, usually for near free, going 10x slower is still better than going at a speed of zero.
Generally, I've seen the exact opposite. People who code their own engines tend to get sucked into the engine and forget that they're supposed to be shipping a game. (I say this as someone who has coded their own engine, multiple times, and ended up not shipping a game--though I had a lot of fun working on the engine.)
The problem is that the fun, cool parts about building your own game engine are vastly outnumbered by the boring parts: supporting level and save data loading/storage, content pipelines, supporting multiple input devices and things like someone plugging in an XBox controller while the game is running and switching all the input symbols to the new input device in real time, supporting various display resolutions and supporting people plugging in new displays while the game is running, and writing something that works on PC/mobile/Switch(2)/XBox/Playstation... all solved problems, none of which are particularly intellectually stimulating to solve correctly.
If someone's finances depend on shipping a game that makes money, there's really no question that you should use Unity or Unreal. Maybe Godot but even that's a stretch. There's a small handful of indie custom game engine success stories, including some of my favorites like The Witness and Axiom Verge, but those are exceptions rather than the rule. And Axiom Verge notably had to be deeply reworked to get a Switch release, because it's built on MonoGame.
Indeed there are people who want to make games, and there are people who think they want to make games, but want to make game engines (I'm speaking from experience, having both shipped games and keeping a junk drawer of unreleased game engines).
Shipping a playable game involves so so many things beyond enjoyable programming bits that it's an entirely different challenge.
I think it's telling that there are more Rust game engines than games written in Rust.
This does not apply just to games, but to most any application designed to be used by human beings, particularly complete strangers.
Typically the “itch is scratched” long before the application is done.
I'm in that camp. After shifting from commercial gamedev I've been itching to build something. I kept thinking "I wanna build a game" but couldn't really think what that came is. Then realised "Actually it's because I want to build an engine" haha
I disagree with this assessment.
After 30 years participating in Gamedev communities I feel like the "don't build an engine" was always an empty strawman aimed at nobody in reality.
The Venn diagram between the people interested in technical aspects of an engine and in also shipping a game is probably composed of a few hundred individuals, most of them working for studios.
The "kid that wants to make an engine to make an MMO" is gonna do neither. It's just a meme.
I shouldn't really care about it myself, but I do because Unity sucked the air out of every gamedev discussion and now there are almost no spaces to discuss anything advanced (even if it's applicable to Unity/Unreal/Godot).
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