Ask HN: Game development without fully fledged IDE like Unity?

[wieghant]

My background is web development. One of my biggest peeves when it came to Java was the fact I was heavily reliant on IDE for the longest time, that meant if my IDE couldn't make sense of the project I imported, neither could I.

I'd like to start from bottom-up with game development. What engine would you guys recommend to use that had CLI capabilities for live reloading/hotswapping(if that's even a thing)?

I understand eventually I will need to use a scene builder and shader/animation editors and whatnot, but I want to understand it on CLI/code level first.

[deepaksurti]

>> CLI capabilities for live reloading/hotswapping

See CEPL, in Common Lisp, if Lisp is your thing.

I have done a from scratch but it was a prototype for a sports game with animations. For animations I chose quake md5 formats, for non animated objects like stadium used ply. Quickly implemented the two readers with c-ffi via Assimp in Lisp.

Next wrote my own scene renderer in Common Lisp (LispWorks) to be precise and the render loop was tied to vsync again using c-ffi. Given Lisp from ground up is a live editing language, you will get the live reloading out of the box.

I would definitely recommend to do it without any bells and whistles, if you are not resource starved to get this game out to make money (very few do, btw). So unless you are keen to learn game programming from ground up, go for it. Else stick to Unity, Unreal to ship something out the door.

[1] https://github.com/cbaggers/cepl

[luxiconn]

If you're okay with C/C++ a really good resource to look at is Handmade Hero (https://handmadehero.org/)

He's creating a game pretty much from scratch and documenting the whole process on video.

If not I would check out MonoGame (http://www.monogame.net/) It's cross platform and technically you can build your game without an IDE.

You can also do browser based games with libraries such as Phaser (https://phaser.io/) and Play Canvas (https://playcanvas.com/)

Having the game live reload on build is possible but imo it's more trouble than it's worth in most cases. You pretty much need to split you game logic out into a shared library (DLL, SO, JAR) and then have the shell executable load it in a runtime.

[slipwalker]

just guessing here, but maybe you could check libGDX ( https://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/ ) but i am not sure about reloading classes... perhaps dcevm ( https://dcevm.github.io/ ) would help.

[mabynogy]

Love2D https://love2d.org/