[aaroninsf]

Ask-HN:

Context:

Every time a game engine like this pops up I read through the comments noting other engines and various perspectives and criticisms (positive and negative).

I have a game-like music composition project I want to pick back up. Media-intensive with a rich isometric/2D environment, with lots of little animations, which need to be synchronized to perfectly-scheduled audio events.

I develop fully-feature prototypes in the past, most recently on iOS for iPad before there was iPadOS... but using Core libraries hit a performance wall on hardware of that era.

Question:

Who can I consult with up front to get good advice on what technology path to pursue, to realize my project?

WebGL/Webasm would be fine. Cross-platform console targets would be fine. iPadOS would be fine and best, gestures are a core part of the vision.

...and I have no idea where and how to find my way into this.

I follow some GameDev feeds and naturally what I read about is very capable application of engines/environments which are quite close to what I need, but which are (naturally) targetting game dev.

Say you wanted to sit down and make a rich visual sequencer with some DAW-like features? What's the right approach?

It's not a traditional DAW, it's much more about a rich tiled game-like UX; it's not a game, with levels, maps, and such... it's got elements of both. The audio engine needs to be DAW-level, but, synchronized to graphical elements and UX and responsive to gesture in a way that's like game-level.

Any ideas welcome. I think I have a good (layperson's) understanding of the overal architecture I need; but I don't know how my conceptual map translates into different styles of game-engine or more general media-engines.

My hunch is my "solodev" state which was a blocker before when I had no time to quit the day job and learn eg. OpenGL for iOS, is significantly ameliorated today by code assistants... iff they are familiar with <the engine/platform>

Do Claude Code etc. know Unity dev? Engines like this one? I don't know! Naive.

Haaaaalp

[spacechild1]

I'm building 2D computer game environments for musical performances and interactive installations. I ended up developing my own little engine. The current iteration is based on:

- SDL2 for input and window management

- OpenGL for rendering

- libpd for sound generation and processing

- RtAudio for audio I/O

- sol2 for Lua bindings

- Qt6 for the tile map editor

I'm not targeting the web, though.

> The audio engine needs to be DAW-level, but, synchronized to graphical elements

Are the sounds generated from game events? In that case, time synchronization between game clock and audio clock is indeed an interesting problem with multiple solutions, each with their own trade-offs.

If the game only acts as the user interface, you can treat it like in a regular DAW.

[aaroninsf]

Thanks for this!

I am torn about backing off to focusing on first getting the UX (which is really "the thing") right, and just emitting a MIDI MPE stream. That obviously has some other benefits but there were things I was keen on having low-level control over... but I can get over that maybe...

Ambivalent also about target—really, the iPad is the ideal and canonical target, in terms of what it can and the UX it affords... but I have this possibly unfounded sense that the amount a coding copilot can assist me is somewhat limited inside the Apple ecosystem... :/

EDIT: oh and is your engine something I can look at (or license or...)? :)

[spacechild1]

> EDIT: oh and is your engine something I can look at (or license or...)? :)

Unfortunately not, it's a private repo. I might open source it at some point in the future, though.

[nprateem]

You can't create prototypes in Godot, etc to test out your idea but you want to try someone's half-baked project instead?!?

You do need to speak to someone.

[aaroninsf]

If you mean me,

Prototypes I already have made; at this point the goal is get something actually stable. I'm willing to look into any approach that has a stable application doing things that I need. I don't want to make another prototype; but I am open to trying an implementation that might not end up being final.

It's proven remarkably difficult to find who to even consult with. AFAICT it's too rarified a need.

[spacechild1]

Hey, my project is quarter-baked at most!