[zadokshi]

Can you abstract away your website so it can run on node.js or angular?

Game development is typically very tightly linked to a mess of proprietary tools and products and platforms. It is the game engine itself that abstracts away for example) the payment/subscription api.

If you were to write your own game abstraction layer we would call what you did a game engine.

Secondly, performance (frames per second) is key in game software. Imagine if you wrote a lightweight abstraction layer for a physics/gravity engine. You’re effectively writing code to slow down your game FPS.

Thirdly, game development is often done by young beginner programmers, who often don’t even know programming yet. They get into game programming by following online YouTube tutorials in a specific game engine. If you know the importance of abstraction your already too high paid to work in a game development position :)

[KronisLV]

> Can you abstract away your website so it can run on node.js or angular?

This is an excellent point. At that point you'd need so much abstraction that you'd basically be building something as complex as the underlying engines.

In rare cases that works out, like for Caves of Qud, but mostly because of the nature of the game: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37548720

The best most folks can dream of is decoupling some of their game logic or mechanisms from the engine somewhat, like what Captain of Industry did:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31588018

That said, I'm surprised that engines like Stride or NeoAxis don't try to imitate the Unity API more - making porting from another engine easier, or being able to reuse some of your existing skills would surely be a good selling point!

[pests]

I read the Caves of Qud post. What exactly is he using a game engine for in the first place? If it can be completely swapped out like that then maybe it wasn't that important in the first place.

[krapp]

Ease of porting and platform support.

[zadokshi]

Yea, to be fair, you can abstract away some parts of games to be sure. You can usually put non graphics related game logic, data persistence, networking into a shared library in your preferred programming language as long as that language can expose its api using a c layer or some sort.

[salawat]

>If you know the importance of abstraction your already too high paid to work in a game development position :)

Way to tacitly admit the gamedev space is a fundamentally exploitive industrial vertical.