[pcwalton]

This rubs me the wrong way. If people enjoy writing graphics engines, even if it's not economically rational to do so, then they should do that!

This is an especially pointless complaint when it comes to video games, because, from a purely economic standpoint, few programmers capable of writing production-quality global illumination should be working on games at all as opposed to getting a job doing something else. (This is a hard pill to swallow, but it is nevertheless true.) The market, especially the indie market, is oversaturated, and, as a result, most people who are highly skilled and involved in game development are, to varying degrees, in it for fun as opposed to money. Since game developers are doing it for fun, why not encourage them to do what they enjoy most?

[proc0]

That's a good point for any dev thinking they can write their own engine... since one is bad at it and shouldn't do it or good at it and perhaps one should just focus on the engine.

[codesushi42]

If you want to ship a game, don't write your own engine. End of story.

[pcwalton]

I don't agree with that statement, but even if it were true, it's off topic for this HN submission. The point of this demo isn't "use this instead of Unity if you want to ship a game". It's "look at this neat thing I made". I prefer to encourage that instead of being gratuitously negative.

[codesushi42]

It is not off topic at all. Don't reinvent the wheel if you want fast, meaningful results. DRY. You should know better. Otherwise it's only useful for curiosity's sake, as stated.

Save yourself the pain and use Unity instead if your goal is to ship something.

[thrax]

What if I want to ship a game engine?

[pjmlp]

Then you better be a 10x engine developer to be able to beat what is already out there.

[Crinus]

This is a common mistake people make. If you make a custom engine you do not need to beat what is already out there since you are certainly not going to use every single feature that the engines out there use. Bespoke engines (that are actually used in games) aren't trying to replace Unreal or Unity, they are only providing what the games they are used for need - anything else is unnecessary. Even in the high end AAA space, most bespoke engines do not provide everything that Unreal does - they focus only on the specifics their development teams need.

This is especially important to keep in mind when it comes to smaller (be it indie or "AA") developers - the developers who write their own engines aren't trying to replace Unreal, these engines only support a tiny tiny fraction of the functionality that Unreal does and that is fine because that functionality is what these developers need. If anything, for a smaller developer that does not have the necessary developer manpower to mold an existing gargantuan engine like Unreal to their needs it can be a better choice to go with their own engine than try to understand and modify Unreal.

[Drakim]

That's silly. Why bother shipping your first game? it's never gonna be be 10x better than the games that already exists of that genre.

[meheleventyone]

This is poor advice because plenty of games of all sizes are shipped using custom engines.

It’s comes about because there are lots of people who say they want to make a game who are far more happy eternally twiddling their tech. Moving to Unity/Unreal/PlayCanvas etc. wouldn’t dampen that impulse just push it in different directions. It’s a bit of an empty page problem where it much easier to obsess about having the right starting conditions than it is to actually just start. Particularly as these people tend towards being more technically capable without a lot of design experience.

[chungus_khan]

It's both important to pick the right tools for the job and also to not get lost in the weeds with that decision, and that's not just a gamedev thing either (though the design work in gamedev makes it really show). I see it a lot in web with pretty much every piece of tech, and the more inconsequential to the functioning of the final deliverable, the more twiddling goes on. Fortunately those twiddlers do tend to really care about the actual technical quality of the project if you can get them actually working on it.