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by msla 1005 days ago
> There's two types of game developers: those who finish and publish games and those who write their own game engine.

Which is why that silly "Quake" thing never went anywhere.

What was John Carmack thinking? How did he ever imagine "Doom' and "Quake" could ever get released?
2 comments
bluescrn 1005 days ago
That was a very different time. That era of pushing hardware to it's limits is mostly history when it comes to games.

These days, hardware is almost limitless* , the real scarce resource is person-hours of development time.

(*Ok, not limitless, there's still some people doing serious optimisation work on games. But for an average indie/mobile developer, it's more about avoiding fairly well known performance pitfalls than worrying about low-level optimisation or inventing really clever algorithms to gain back some speed)

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msla 1005 days ago
Maybe a single person can't make a Triple-A game engine. That's not a problem, because a single person can't make anything else needed for a Triple-A game, either.

Photorealistic art assets? Voice acting from name actors? Really crappy hackneyed plots which fall to pieces under the slightest scrutiny? I think Bethesda actually has a patent on that. Lootbox mechanics which are a couple iffy election cycles away from a Senate subcommittee hearing? None of that is coming out of a bedroom developer. Writing a simple engine for a simple indie game with the kinds of art and mechanics a single person or small unfunded team can accomplish, however, is a lot more feasible.

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vunderba 1004 days ago
This isn't really a very good example for two reasons

1. The concept of licensable game engines during the development of doom in the early 90s was hardly a common thing, and certainly nothing along the lines of a low barrier, low cost entry like unity used to be

2. Id software is very well known for basically being a tech company more than a game company, and later went on to make a great deal of money licensing out the doom and quake engines to other companies who could then focus on creating games without having to build a bespoke engine

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