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by everling 1967 days ago
I wanted to make a video game. Over the course of a few years I built my own 3d engine and SDK, using only Java and the OpenGL API. By the time I got to a state where an actual game could be made (sort of a point and click adventure) I fell out of love with games altogether.

If you want to actually make a game, use something like Godot, Unreal or Unity. If you want to do all the ”fun parts” of designing a rendering pipeline, implementing shaders, inventing a scripting language but not actually make anything, roll your own engine..

2 comments

Just because you had a bad experience with something, doesn't mean that this experience of yours is applicable to others.

Are you familiar with Jonathan Whiting? If not, have a look, please:

https://jonathanwhiting.com/writing/blog/games_in_c/

https://jonathanwhiting.com/

As far as I am concerned, he made everything on his own and had his success with it.

That sounds interesting to me. Did you ever end up posting the code of your engine anywhere? I think others would find the fruits of your labour useful.
Thanks, but I doubt anyone would find it useful apart from the curiosity and novelty of it. It's neither optimized from a performance or development perspective and it lacks visual fidelity (my friends kept reminding me that it looked like Minecraft). I have some videos from way back demonstrating how making a scene could look like (everything was done in-engine):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUxVISIwAa4&feature=emb_titl... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEQ1_MIRMMc&feature=emb_titl...

That's cool. Thanks for sharing :) I think anything created from scratch like this has value from an artistic standpoint.

Good luck with your future endevours!

And just to clarify, this was a hobby project alongside studies, not a full-time endeavor..