Comment by jon-wood

9 months ago

From a starting point of having dabbled in making 2D games in the past it took me a few days of working through tutorials and documentation for producing assets to be the bottleneck in building a game in Unreal. In Godot I was at the point of being able to make terrible games within a few hours. The amount of lifting that modern game engines do for you is phenomenal, and I think anyone claiming they can write an engine from scratch quicker than they can implement a game with an existing engine is deluding themselves.

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jon-wood

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59nadir  9 months ago

I can have an engine ready for you that allows you to render arbitrary 2D sprites, levels of them, etc. or whatever in a day. People gamejam more interesting and advanced stuff than you're talking about. The mechanics of just shoving together some 2D sprites is not some big undertaking even if you write your engine from scratch, it's making something actually fun and interesting from it that takes time and effort.

aleph_minus_one  9 months ago

> The amount of lifting that modern game engines do for you is phenomenal, and I think anyone claiming they can write an engine from scratch quicker than they can implement a game with an existing engine is deluding themselves.

If the game fits a rather "standardized" template, this is likely true. But the more you move away from these "mainstream structures", the less true the second part of your claim becomes.

oliverdzedou  9 months ago

I think reaching for the delusion card without considering people's preferences, experiences, expertise and philosophy is completely disingenuous and shows that you don't look at game development holistically. Yes, existing engines do a lot of lifting, especially in 3D rendering and physics. But what about games that don't have physics? Or have completely different physics than you would expect? You mentioned assets being the bottleneck, but what about games that don't use any assets at all? It's nice to have 3D solved, but what if your game attempts to emulate 4D? What if you just hate GUI and it slows you down?

For a more concrete argument. You also said learning Unreal using tutorials took a few days, which is certainly not possible, unless we are talking only about a very basic understanding. In the same vein, it also takes a few days to make a very basic engine built on top of OpenGL.

  • krige  9 months ago

    Here's the thing: you try to counter someone arguing against a patently false statement about development speed with a bunch of preferences and what-abouts that do not necessarily make your stance true anyway - for instance if my game attempts to emulate 4D, my own engine STILL needs to do everything else too, we're not talking dev time for 4D in, say, Godot vs 4D in foo engine, we're talking 4D in Godot vs 4D and graphics and input and audio and physics and... in foo engine.