[lightedman]

No, they're real gamedevs. Much like Richard Garriott, they built their own tools, unlike every AAA company out there using someone elses engine.

These guys did the ALL of the work from the ground up. That's REAL development.

[cazum]

I don't want to start a philosophical argument here about what a "real dev" is, but I do want to provide a counterpoint to any potential gamedevs who may be reading this:

While writing your own engine from scratch can sound tempting, and absolutely is a rewarding excercise, if your goal is to publish a game, it's probably wise to not do this. Pick up gamemaker or godot or unity and start prototyping right away.

I might have a bit of a bias here, but I spend a not-insignificant amount of time on an online gamedev community, and the only people who ever finish anything are the guys using gamemaker and unity. Everyone else gets stuck at the "should I use regular inheritance or components/what's the best way to z-order sprites/Delta time coefficients cause random bugs in physics" stage and cannot proceed because their engine becomes unstable.

If you have the skills and time, and feel like it is necessary to write your own engine for your game, then by all means, but I think that for most people, these prerequisites don't exist.

"Real dev" or not, once you shipped your game, you've done more than most devs.

[amagumori]

I 1000% agree with this. At the same time, I think developing your own engine is immensely empowering and helps you "level up" in some fashion. I'd recommend doing both. But, of course, just use an existing engine and make a game first. The engine is a long haul endeavor. It starts very slowly, but eventually, you'll be able to roll your own games with it. And there's something about that that's very cool. But don't write an entire engine for your first or even second game.

[ygra]

So real real game developers should ship their own operating system to run the game on. As well as their own hardware. Because all the others are just using someone else's and are lazy.

Sorry, but doing more work just for the sake of doing more work is not something that's impressive. It's merely a waste of time. For .kkrieger the technical achievement of fitting that much in so little space is definitely impressive, but dismissing developers that were using a licensed engine is pointless. Most games are built with finite time and money. If you can build a better game by allocating money somewhere you'd otherwise have spent time at the expense of part of the game, then that's a net win in my eyes, and doesn't diminish the result in the slightest.

[lightedman]

"So real real game developers should ship their own operating system to run the game on. As well as their own hardware. Because all the others are just using someone else's and are lazy."

I believe there's rules on HN regarding unwarranted snark. You very obviously missed the entire point of what I said so there's no point in trying to explain.

[gambiting]

I'd like to point out that I work at one of the largest(if not the largest) gamedev company in the world and 100% of our projects use our own engines.

Unless you believe that every single game should write its own engine from scratch, then I don't know what to say about that, it's just extremely obvious that it's not feasible for every project regardless of whether you have 100 or 10000 people working at your company.

[PhasmaFelis]

I have enormous respect for these guys for everything they do, but condemning someone for using a third-party engine that works fine instead of reinventing the wheel is silly. Some people love and excel at making engines; some people love and excel at making content. We need both.