This kind of argument has been made since the days of renderware.
I have seen a number of projects go from
'We're building our own engine'
To
'we should have just gone with $engine_of_the_day'
To
'We were so lucky we chose to make our own engine'
If you want to make a game like fortnight, the Unreal is your pick. If you want to try something that hasn't been done before you could do worse than rolling your own engine.
Especially if you are looking for where the fun is, the idiosyncrasies of your own engine gives you a world with it's own flavour if you incorporate that flavour into your design process you could create a feedback loop that turns into something special.
RenderWare was quite a special case that made trust in third party engines go down significantly since EA closed it to external customers just as the PS3 hit (Renderware kind-of saved the PS2 since it was "complicated" in the same ways as the PS3 but having a middleware enabled many smaller developers to focus on their games).
Engines has been (And is to a large extent) bad business because unless you really do something _really special_ it's way expensive for little gains (especially if you're targeting realistic games since there is so much to focus on before even considering portability).
And I say this as someone who started out working on custom engines (but am out of the business outside of hobby stuff).
This “flavor” at the engine level doesn’t always make it back up to the end user, and even if it does, it is likely something that could have been replicated by existing engines, if developers cared enough to do it right.
There are very few games where the engine is what made all the difference. Maybe something like Half Life 2 with the source engine is the exception, but ultimately, what makes a game good are traits that can be universally applicable to any engine.
Truth is, it’s not that 90s anymore. Hardware has advanced to the point that you can have general purpose game engines that can be molded to any type of game. You do not need purpose built engines anymore.
And someday, if you can imagine, we’ll just have AI churning out visual representation of game state, turning game development purely into a declarative data driven exercise.
>Truth is, it’s not that 90s anymore. Hardware has advanced to the point that you can have general purpose game engines that can be molded to any type of game. You do not need purpose built engines anymore.
I disagree, I think there's an over-emphasis on generating high quality individual frames and a expectation of what it is you should be able to do in games.
You can have a game that is photorealistic but you turn around and have your gun barrel poke into the wall and disappear. How many games can you throw enough junk into a river and make it change course eroding a new path for itself as it goes?
Some games rely on clear specific rules of an engine for the player to know because the rules are an integral part of the game, and any inconsistency in implementation creates a feeling of being cheated. Often you can implement such things in standard engines, but you are working against them the entire way.
You could have a game where a player sees a pylon and knows that because it is made of metal you could melt one of the legs and make it fall over. but to do that the entire construction of the game rules are integrated into the world. Most games teach the player that things like pylons are static objects unless they need to be destroyed for a plot point in which case just this one is different. Perhaps the player just has to learn that pylons are one of the class of destroyable things. Making emergent properties goes engine deep.
>And someday, if you can imagine, we’ll just have AI churning out visual representation of game state, turning game development purely into a declarative data driven exercise.
And therein lies the problem. A game engine is game state. You can make it pretty any number of ways, The engine will still be the thing deciding what you can do, and it is the things you can do that makes it play.
>There are very few games where the engine is what made all the difference.
Maybe if you ignore the entirety of the retro gaming scene where people are using old engines and modified old engines because they bring along a lot of the feel and expected behavior.
The average modern Unreal and Unity game feels like shit, but some dev's can pull off making new engines behave like old ones we love. It requires a lot of work. Just look at New Bloods catalog of games that pulled it off. DUSK (unity), Amid Evil (UE4), Ultrakill (Unity). Each one of those games had a lot of passion behind them driving for gameplay perfection in the style of a retro game and/or engine.
I’m new to game dev and been developing a 3D engine for my game after dabbling with Godot.
I read a lot of opinions on whether it is a good idea and it all boiled down to ‘my god, no, don’t write your engine. That said, I did and I am sure glad I did invest 3 years on a framework I know like the back of my hands’ and that told me exactly what I wanted to hear.
It’s like the whole AI debacle, really. If your goal is to ship a product, go with a premade engine. If your goal is to enjoy the craft and learn how stuff works, and you got that itch to do it the difficult way, then roll your sleeves and dive in. It’s always a pleasure to play a game with a completely unique feel.
The framing of "a professional game developer.. job is to ship a product" is very indie. Places like ID, Bethesda, Volition (RIP) etc.: like a hundred people worked on the product and many did not own shipping the product. When you have tech team of 10 - 30 people whether you should make your own engine was more of a question. Lots of very popular games are made on their own tech.
Also, like what do you mean by engine? Minecraft was made with LWJGL.
And Minecraft physics are limited to AABBs and rendering was flat unlit quads until quite recently. But they definitely couldn't have done the infinite cube world easily on Unity or Unreal, so in that sense it was necessary to build their own.
>> Craft > sales. Great craftsmanship always sells,
That is exactly how I perceived the game industry to be before I worked in it. Now I know that there are many objectively excellent or even innovative or influential games that do not sell, or also do not sell well enough to support their development costs.
Could you give an example of something excellent and either innovative or influential that did not sell well? It’s a question I have sought to answer myself. Especially if you can find one that doesn’t take development costs into account.
So I’m looking for an “objectively” (figuratively) excellent game, that has not sold many copies at all. A game on steam that should be popular but isn’t. Do you have any examples?
I’ve worked on a bunch of games that have been canned despite being crafted with love and innovative in their own ways. It’s not enough to just be well crafted, especially if you need to pay the salaries of 10 people for 1-2 years to make the game.
To cite one, Okami, innovative gameplay, striking art very poor sales, they made most of their sales after the fact after the studio closed and the game got ported to other systems than the PS2.
Sorry I did not reply with an example earlier, but InvaildorTaken just provide a perfect one. I was talking to some of the creators of this game last week. They are the people who made some of the biggest hits at Blizzard. They are super proud of that game and IMO it's really good. You can nitpick it, but you can nitpick hit games too.
I mean there's a point when you can go "why bother selling a game when i can learn to algo trade and maybe get hired by a major investment bank" if you really want to push the logic of all money no creativity to its inevitable end point. There would be no gaming industry. There would be no art. There would be no music. There would be no sports. There would be no movies. All of that is wasted profit potential against simply being involved directly in finance and in trading assets, preferably rooted in underlying material commodities.
> Especially if you are looking for where the fun is, the idiosyncrasies of your own engine gives you a world with it's own flavour if you incorporate that flavour into your design process you could create a feedback loop that turns into something special.
I loved the old STALKER games, and the wackiness of their engines was a lot of the charm. I ended up buying the new one out of nostalgic dedication and it's probably the worst example of "Unreal slop" I've experienced, having not bought many newer games. I'm sure the butchers running Xbox have run the numbers and think they'll make even more money throwing armies of contractors with allegedly fungible skills at the next Doom games, but I'll leave others to bankroll that while I enjoy games I don't need frame generation for.
It could still compete with Unreal! If this really is the end of the line for IdTech, ZeniMax should gift the whole thing to the Blender Foundation. I would pitch it as:
- Huge tax write-off
- Commoditizes their complement
- If it succeeds, ultimately lowers the cost of triple-A game dev
Realistically speaking, how hard is it to vibe code an engine these days? Unreal is source available and I am willing to bet the source code has been used to train AI models. And there are genuine open source projects like Godot that can be used as a foundation, license permitting (or not). The bigger moat seems to be all the tooling around the actual engine.
Vibe coding an engine is way harder than vibe coding something onto an existing engine. It’s something I have worked on for fun in my free time.
I have the ability to make the engine I’m making on my own, but trying out AI for the experience. It really sucks in ways that make it good for what an engine needs. A good engine needs to plan pretty far ahead and plan well at high architecture level. AI is actually awful at that despite it being okay at making plans at implementing said plan.
I didn't try that hard but I did not have much success. I spent some time trying to vibe code a forward clustered renderer in vulkan and I couldn't manage to get anything I was too happy with. Mostly just regurgitation of a few different tutorials. It's possible I'm just too dumb to use AI and it was also 18 months ago, so things have progressed on the LLM front.
I have seen a number of projects go from
'We're building our own engine'
To
'we should have just gone with $engine_of_the_day'
To
'We were so lucky we chose to make our own engine'
If you want to make a game like fortnight, the Unreal is your pick. If you want to try something that hasn't been done before you could do worse than rolling your own engine.
Especially if you are looking for where the fun is, the idiosyncrasies of your own engine gives you a world with it's own flavour if you incorporate that flavour into your design process you could create a feedback loop that turns into something special.