[da_chicken]

Are you going writing your own programming language as well? Can we call it Tolkien? Because you're making a game like J.R.R. Tolkien wrote books, and there's a reason nobody writes books the way he wrote his.

Writing your own engine is great if you want to learn how to write a game engine. Knowing how to make a game engine can be helpful when making a game, but it's not necessary to make a game. Further, if you want to learn how to make a game, it might be more worth your time to simply use an engine that already does all the things you need. That way your time and energy can be focused on making the game, which is what your goal is.

Being condescending or dismissive of tools that do everything your tools you're going out of your way to construct will have to do is... weird logic. Because the same argument goes all the way down. Why wouldn't you make your own text editor? Why wouldn't you make your own compiler? Why wouldn't you make your own kernel? Why wouldn't you make your own architecture? "If you wish to make a pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

The answer is: because we're human beings with limited lifespans. We must stand on the shoulders of giants to see further.

[tombert]

One person wrote books like JRR Tolkien. His name was JRR Tolkien, and those books are widely celebrated by millions of people as classics.

I don’t have any issue with people using an engine like Godot or Unity or RPG Maker or Unreal or anything else, but I do think that there can be value in “owning the entire stack” of a project, even if that means “reinventing the wheel”.

When I do a project involving HTTP, I could reach for Rails or something, it’s a valid enough and I certainly have done that plenty of times, but I often will work with a lower level protocol. Depending on the language I will use a more simple HTTP server thing like Axum with Rust, and other times I will go full epoll/Selector with a raw socket.

I do this for a variety of reasons, but the main one is that I can build my own framework that works in a way that I think and I don’t pull in a bunch of extra crap I don’t need. I can optimize the “hot paths” of my particular project without worrying about a one-size-fits-all you get for generic frameworks, I don’t have to worry as much about leaky abstractions, and I am intimately familiar with a much larger percentage of the codebase.

There is value in both approaches.

[wqaatwt]

Tolkien was exceptional and dedicated his entire life to it. 99.99+% of all people do not possess such a combination of talent and focus and therefore end up having to use “shortcuts”.

[wiseowise]

> and there's a reason nobody writes books the way he wrote his

And there's a reason nobody came even close to his grandiose.

> Being condescending or dismissive of tools that do everything your tools you're going out of your way to construct will have to do is... weird logic.

They've merely pointed out that there's nothing wrong with reinventing tools, you're the one attacking them.

[Dwedit]

Make your own programming language? Penny's Big Breakaway was created using a new programming language named Beef.

[anonymous908213]

It sounds like you don't like programming. I am in the process of writing my own language/IDE/compiler on the side of making games, and have already written a dialect of C# with a compiler that transpiles it to legal C# for use in the meantime. I would, in fact, love to write my own OS if not for the fact that proprietary hardware vendors make it virtually impossible for anybody to create a new OS that runs on consumer hardware in the year 2026. If you gave me a trillion dollars with which to build a CPU factory, I'd jump at the chance to learn that too.

People who don't like programming, who wish to abstract it all away and "stand on the shoulders of giants"[1] without understanding anything about the giants, seem to view low-level code as a bogeyman. It doesn't take a lifetime to understand. To the contrary, I would argue that low-level code is easier to work with than working only with high-level code, because you can reason about it. The more you rely on abstractions you don't understand, the more impossible it becomes to effectively reason about anything, because your reasoning is glossing over the details that make things work. But reasoning about primitives, and the things built out of those primitives that you understand, is not actually nearly as hard as the people who just want to plop Javascript libraries together and stop thinking about it would believe.

In particular, when it comes to games, especially 2D games (which are what Godot and MonoGame are typically used for), it's really not that hard. Windows has an API for doing X, Y and Z with graphics. Linux has an API for doing X, Y, and Z for graphics. You write a wrapper that your game code calls that passes through calls to each of those APIs with an #if statement filtering for which OS you're running on. Rinse and repeat the other set of platforms, with a bit of extra finangling for API limitations on web and phone OSes. Rinse and repeat for audio, input, and font handling. It took less than a month of work for me to get a polished cross-platform system working on five platforms. Not because I'm a genius, but because it's seriously just not hard. There are a thousand tutorials and books you could pick from that will give you a rundown of exactly how to do it.

Then, for example, writing your own rudimentary 2D GUI map editor can literally be done in a day. Presumably you know how to code a main menu. Add an option to the main menu that changes the gamestate to State.MapEditor when selected. Set a keybind on this state where your arrow keys increment or decrement X/Y coordinates, a keybind to place tiles/objects, a keybind to cycle which object ID is selected, and a keybind that calls a function which serializes your map state to text and saves it to a file. A little bit more work for a moving camera viewport, but it's not that hard. Want more features, polish it more. When you fully understand the primitives your system is built with, adding new features can be done quickly and easily, because it's so easy to reason about compared to reasoning about code you've never read built with primitives you don't understand.

3D does up the difficulty level, but it's by no means unachievable, either. The content creator Tsoding is currently doing a semi-weekly challenge to build his own 3D game engine from scratch on video, and he's making great progress despite not spending that much time on it, a side project that gets a few hours a week.

The end result of all this is a codebase that is more performant, lightweight, easy to read, and very easy to extend. I think developing your own engine can actually save time in the long run (if you're willing to forego the instant gratification), because it's so easy to fix bugs and add new features when you have a complete mental map of your codebase and the primitives used to construct it. For example, I have a friend who used Godot to develop a game, and they've been plagued for months with a low percentage chance of fatal crashes on a boss that they are completely unable to identify and fix, and it's because they don't have a mental map of the engine code. It's simply not even possible for them to reason about what in the engine could be going wrong because they don't even know what the engine is actually doing.

[1] Another metaphor that is grossly mis-invoked, in my view. Do you think Isaac Newton did not understand the work of those that came before him? The great thing about giants is that by doing the hard work of exploring new concepts, they make it easier for everyone who comes after them to learn them. I think it's a bit intellectually lazy to put off the work of giants as something that should not, or even can not, be learned.

[2] "like J.R.R. Tolkien wrote books, and there's a reason nobody writes books the way he wrote his." It's a real shame more people don't, considering there has never been a fantasy work rivalling his in the nearly century since.

[shooly]

It sounds like you're talking about making an equivalent of Super Mario from the 80s, but modern games are in fact much more complex.

And no, just because people in the 80s enjoyed Super Mario doesn't mean it's the pinnacle of game design, and that there's no need to create anything more complex.

> It took less than a month of work for me to get a polished cross-platform system working on five platforms.

You simply don't know where the bugs and performance pitfalls are because you haven't encountered them, yet. That is especially true regarding consoles with their custom hardware and mobile devices with their abundance of cheap, often not well engineered hardware and sketchy drivers.

[anonymous908213]

"Modern games" span a wide range of things. I develop solely 2D games, because I prefer 2D games over 3D games. I think that even today 2D games are more enjoyable than 3D games. That doesn't mean Super Mario Bros. That can mean Europa Universalis IV, it can mean Stardew Valley, it can mean Magic the Gathering Online, it can mean Hollow Knight, it can mean Slay the Spire, it can mean a huge variety of interesting and engaging games, none of which require 3D graphics. 2D games can be as complex as you'd like them to be, far more complex in game logic than a 3D shooter even. The more complex you'd like them to be, the easier it gets to implement them if you understand the primitives you're implementing them with. Imagine trying to optimize your data structures when you don't even know what an int32 is? There are real game developers in the world who don't know even that much. It is a great thing that off-the-shelf game engines provide a level of accessibility to allow anyone to develop games, but they do not represent the pinnacle of what can be achieved in software engineering. They are the exact opposite of it, in fact.

> You simply don't know where the bugs and performance pitfalls are because you haven't encountered them, yet.

What is your point? I profile my games and have detailed logging systems. If I or my users run into performance issues, I address them as I come across them. Understanding my codebase at a low level makes it significantly easier to dig into problems and investigate underlying root causes than anyone on Unity will ever be able to. If you use Unity, you are putting your complete faith that Unity has perfectly optimized X low-level problem away at the engine level. If they haven't, and you run into that issue in your game, you are completely fucked. I love being solely responsible for the defects in my games. That means I can fix them myself. The worst thing in the world in software development is when somebody else's fuck-up becomes your problem, and you can't fix it, so you have to implement some hacky workaround, if you can even figure out why the closed-source engine code you didn't write and can't read is behaving incorrectly to work around it in the first place. Sometimes that still happens anyways -- our hardware-OS stacks are built with tens or hundreds of millions of line of dogshit code, and you can't get around it if you want to create software for platforms people use, but you can at least remove as many dependencies on bad code you have no understanding of as possible.

[shooly]

> I address them as I come across them

You're already too late at that point, and you probably lost some players, that wanted to try your game and maybe would've even liked it.

And I'm not talking about gameplay logic bugs - I'm talking about issues caused by bad drivers or by not having intimate knowledge about the hardware.

> If you use Unity, you are putting your complete faith that Unity has perfectly optimized X low-level problem away at the engine level

Most major engines allow to bypass high-level abstractions either through scripts that access low-level systems (Unity) or by directly letting people modify the source code (Unreal Engine, Godot).

> I love being solely responsible for the defects in my games.

Players do not care about that.

[anonymous908213]

> by directly letting people modify the source code (Unreal Engine, Godot).

Unreal is not open source, and while Godot is, I would wager 90% of its users never even look at the source code. It very specifically attracts people who want an easy way to make games without prior expertise.

> Players do not care about that.

Users don't care about much when it comes to software quality, honestly. They accept 20 FPS, slow loading, bug-riddled games that consume +20gb ram and +100gb more disk space than necessary. They may complain about a game if it gets bad enough, but they still buy and play those games. My games are significantly more optimized than most. They aren't perfect, but they don't need to be. They don't even need to be as optimized as I have made them, it's mostly just a point of pride and making the kind of software I want to see in the world. I think the only way you lose a player on technical points is if they literally cannot boot your game, but those issues plague engine games too. I had driver issues myself crashing on boot with an UE5 game two weeks ago.