Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)

https://www.noelberry.ca/posts/making_games_in_2025/

by alvivar • 5 months ago

457 211 5 months ago

rob742• 5 months ago

After I read the title, I fully expected this to be about writing games using AI. But no, actually there is no mention of AI to be found in the text, not even in the "Miscellaneous Thoughts" section, which seems to be mostly answers to "why don't you use X?" questions. Refreshing...

oneeyedpigeon• 5 months ago

The author is Noel Berry, creator of Celeste. They don't shout about it, but with that pedigree, I'm confident they'll be staying well away from AI.

Vespasian• 5 months ago

Or they'll take a look at what, if anything at all,they can use in their workflow as a useful tool not a magic solution.

No need to brag about that.

MasterScrat• 5 months ago

Why would a game development pedigree correlate with rejecting AI? As Carmack said:

AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics.

mock-possum• 5 months ago

Because Celeste is left-aligned, and deriding AI as planet-destroying slop stolen from poor artist is a left position to take.

kleiba2• 5 months ago

Discussed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44038209

(246 comments)

rimmontrieu2• 5 months ago

Nice article, engines are bloated and introduce so many overheads. If you don't intend to ship any AAA games, consider investing your times to learn code-first game frameworks like libGDX, MonoGame, love2d,... or even lower level stuffs like SDL, bgfx, opengl which are good enough for almost any cases. A bit higher learning curve is expected but it won't hide anything from you, or bury you under tons of bloated abstractions.

JoeyJoJoJr• 5 months ago

I’d highly recommend going with SDL if it’s 2D. IMO libraries like MonoGame, Love2D, LibGDX only offer small conveniences over SDL with big negative tradeoffs, sacrificing portability, quality of libraries, and conventions. The downsides of using C++ are now heavily mitigated with the use AI tools.

I could never jell with C++ until I had Cursor hold my hand (especially around the build system), and now I feel like I am developing games with a razor sharp knife that I could never before access. The patterns associated working directly with memory suddenly clicked and now it’s the only I want to build games.

tripledry• 5 months ago

Similar, I also went back to mainly C++ and Raylib now that I can delegate the "boring" stuff to AI, never had any issues with programming in C++ it was mainly adding dependencies and builds I hated (configuration).

I still don't use it (AI) for the game programming as it sucks the joy out of it for me. Especially when AI usage is currently being pushed hard at work.

raincole3• 5 months ago

I'm actually building my own mini-engine with SDL_GPU. It works ok so far. I'm quite confident that it's capable enough to replicate most of Unity's URP features (except the shader graph as I don't plan to expose such an interface for artists).

But I haven't reached to the more tedious parts, like doing skeleton animation on GPU and testing cross platform (SDL should be naturally cross platform, but I never tested it...), etc. The most tedious part, imo, is to build your own 3D scene editor.

At very least I can say SDL has reached a passable state for 3D. It doesn't support some modern features like bindless though.

And one doesn't need to stich with C++ if they don't want to. SDL is pure C and if your favorite language can call foreign function it's not that hard to make it work with SDL.

simooooo• 5 months ago

Nobody seems to consider that doing it yourself, requires you implement it at least as efficiently as the commercial engine did, otherwise you're just creating a worse-performing implementation that seems to behave just like a bloated engine does.

flohofwoe2• 5 months ago

The big difference is that the big game engines have to cover all sorts of genres and scenarios, which often results in bloated "jack of all trades master of none" code compared to engine-layer code that's highly specialized for exactly one, or few very similar games.

Levitating2• 5 months ago

That's not necessarily true, engines also create overhead. If you create your own engine, you can tailor it exactly to your use case.

Besides not all games need performance, I have been working on a clone of the original elite game using SDL. It gets 6000 fps easily.

Cthulhu_3• 5 months ago

SDL is used in Factorio, which IMO is the best showcase of what is possible if you go all-in on e.g. C++ when it comes to performance, both in terms of what is rendered on screen and the mind-blowing numbers of what your factories are doing.

rahkiin• 5 months ago

And most gameplay is written in Lua

rimmontrieu2• 5 months ago

For more context, I've developed over 200 games[0] using libGDX and threejs. I've learnt so much from working with code-oriented frameworks that are closer to the system APIs. I can never imagine if I could do all that in today full-blown game engines in term of effectiveness and development speed.

[0] https://ookigame.com

Froztnova• 5 months ago

I've been building some stuff with love2D for a while now, more a hobby than anything else, and I've really enjoyed the process. Nothing really crazy, just a 2D platformer.

I think that if I were making something in 3D or I were more serious I'd use an engine, but I've found that I get more satisfaction from building tools than from learning how to use tools that other people have built.

racefan76• 5 months ago

How does one pick a tool/framework from these options when starting out with game development? I've seen the sentiment of "just pick anything" but the amount of choices is giving me some analysis paralysis.

bob10293• 5 months ago

The primary thing I'm going for in a commercial engine is platform targeting and stability. Some of the defaults are certainly "bland", but that ensures I can actually ship this thing to a meaningful % of the available market. Unity's coverage is so consistent that I've been debating using it for non gaming applications. There aren't many cross platform ecosystems that work this well.

bizzletk• 5 months ago

What are some things that you'd build with Unity that aren't games?

bob10293• 5 months ago

User interfaces for complex physical plants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_twin

voidUpdate3• 5 months ago

Not OP, but at £JOB, I use Unity most of the time making demo and sales apps for clients to use at shows. The fact that it can build for basically every common platform and (most of the time) not need any special considerations for that makes it ideal for us. Sure, we could write web apps or something, but that's a different department.

I'm also not sure if it's still in the installer, but it used to ask you what you would be using unity for, and I don't remember most of the options, but one of them was "military simulations" or something like that, so they are aware of the possibility

Zarathruster3• 5 months ago

Just a polite heads-up in case you weren't aware: for non-game usage of Unity, the licensing situation is... a little complicated. That goes for the engine as well as a lot of the stuff I've seen in the Asset Store. Just a thing to bear in mind, and potentially a reason to use a different engine.

bob10293• 5 months ago

It's not that complicated.

The pro license at ~$2k/year per seat is all you need unless you are making a shitload of money. In which case, you are going to pay ~5k/year per seat.

redbell• 5 months ago

Our game, Celeste

I was really enjoying reading this piece until I read the above, then I realized I am reading for a big developer, the maker of, Celeste [1]. I am definitely adding this to my list of favorite articles about making games.

Also, you may want to check a previous discussion from nine months ago (573 points, 246 comments ): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44038209

_____________

1. https://store.steampowered.com/app/504230/Celeste/

iNic• 5 months ago

Just want to +1 this. It is a game so good I bought (and beat) it twice, once on Switch and once on Steam.

hjkl02• 5 months ago

But Celeste came out in 2018. How is it relevant to 2025 as suggested in the title?

Also, pretty sure it was a small indie team rather than a “big developer”

PacificSpecific2• 5 months ago

How is it not relevant? Celeste wasn't exactly a pinnacle of bleeding edge technology when it came out.

If I remember correctly it was a team of 2.

tecleandor• 5 months ago

It's the same developer as Celeste, but in the article they talk about "city of none" [0], that's a yet unreleased game they're working on right now.

  0: https://cityofnone.com/

Murfalo• 5 months ago

In the article they make that 2025 is a tipping point where open source frameworks and libraries "just work", making speedy, fun development possible without needing to fight the clunkiness of heavyweight engines.

And any new stuff regarding Celeste or from their devs will forever be relevant to me! Highly recommend to any who haven't played it.

ecshafer2• 5 months ago

I think Celeste was popular enough in the indie space to get "big developer". To put some words in OP's mouth, its not "Big Developer" as in a large studio. But "Big Developer" as in well known and acclaimed.

kelvinjps10• 5 months ago

I also reached the same conclusion, it feels wholesome

tmtvl• 5 months ago

Better link to Itch (<https://maddymakesgamesinc.itch.io/celeste>) than Steam, Itch by default only takes a 10% cut instead of 30%.

wasting_time• 5 months ago

I thought Celeste was a solo project of Maddy Thorson [0] before reading this piece.

0: https://maddymakesgames.com/

Fans of Celeste will almost certainly enjoy the local multiplayer game Towerfall by the same developers.

imtringued• 5 months ago

I often find the default feature implementations in large engines like Unity so lacking I end up writing my own anyway. Eventually, my projects end up being mostly my own tools and systems, and the engine becomes just a vehicle for a nice UI and some rendering...

I honestly don't see anything wrong with using the engine for its UI and "some rendering" kind of sweeps a lot of the complicated 3d light handling under the rug. I think the biggest mistake large engines have made is baking in features as first class citizens instead of those features being part of a standard plugin you could have written yourself from scratch once you reach that stage.

I've contemplated building my own editor UI, but after four weeks I realized that I'm just rebuilding the same UI structure you see in FreeCAD, Blender, Isaac Sim, Godot, etc. There's always a 3D viewport, there's a scene tree and there is an inspector panel for looking at the properties. So why not just use the Godot editor as a UI and provide my own custom nodes? By the time I've outgrown the training wheels, I've spent months working on the actually differentiating features.

nkrisc• 5 months ago

I honestly don't see anything wrong with using the engine for its UI and "some rendering" kind of sweeps a lot of the complicated 3d light handling under the rug. I think the biggest mistake large engines have made is baking in features as first class citizens instead of those features being part of a standard plugin you could have written yourself from scratch once you reach that stage.

Godot is more or less built that way. The entire node system is an abstraction over the various “servers” and you can even completely forgo it if you want, providing your own MainLoop implementation (instead of the included SceneTree implementation of MainLoop) and then just use the servers directly.

A lot of the editor features are also implemented as plugins. It’s been very easy turning the Godot editor into a custom editor for my game by writing some simple plugins

abcde6667772• 5 months ago

My experience with making your own engine vs using an off the shelf solution - the former can be viable and even superior on the condition that you know what you're doing. That is if you've built entire games or engines before, or have enough experience with the internals of one.

Otherwise it can be a dangerous fool's errand on which many projects go to die. My younger naive self can attest to this, he loved trying to build his own overly-ambitious engines. But he never finished any games.

Another thought if you do roll your own - keep it simple stupid. When your brain tells you that some amazing nested scene graph with integrated occlusion culling would be the coolest thing in the world, but you lack evidence that you'll actually need all that functionality, tell your brain that it's being stupid and just implement some kind of basic flat scene structure. You can always retrofit it later.

Also - study the code of the likes of Carmack. Consider that he produced the likes of the quake engines in only a couple of years. Reflect long and hard on the raw simplicity of a lot of that code.

Do not worship complexity.

These are the words of someone who has walked both roads!

spppedury• 5 months ago

when Quake was being written, it was pushing the level of managable complexity at the time.

they used NeXT workstations to develop it, the programming tools on PCs were too weak for such a project

today it might look simple, but it's easy to say that when you open it in VS Code and have Intellisense, autocomplete, go to definition, ultra fast compilers, tons of RAM, and google for everything

pjc503• 5 months ago

Consider that he produced the likes of the quake engines in only a couple of years. Reflect long and hard on the raw simplicity of a lot of that code

Things like the famous fast inverse square root are short, but I would hesitate to describe it as simple.

Ironically one of the things that the Quake engine relies on is clever culling. Like Doom, the level is stored in a pre-computed binary space partition tree so that the engine can uniquely determine from what volume you're in what the set of possibly visible quads is (if my memory is correct, oddly the engine uses quads rather than triangles) AND how to draw them in reverse order using painter's algorithm, because the software renderer doesn't have a z-buffer.

https://www.fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/quakeSourceRendit...

The BSP partitioning used to take several minutes to run back in the day.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that Carmack used a few, clever, high-impact techniques to achieve effects, which were also "imperfect but good enough".

If you're not Carmack, don't over-optimize until you've run a profiler.

scott_w• 5 months ago

(if my memory is correct, oddly the engine uses quads rather than triangles)

I'm also working off a near 30-year-old memory but I recall quads not being unusual around this time. I remember a preview of Tomb Raider 3 in Official Playstation Magazine making a big deal out of the updated engine using triangles instead of quads to draw things. This was around 1998, so a couple of years after Quake came out.

BearOso• 5 months ago

Things like the famous fast inverse square root are short, but I would hesitate to describe it as simple.

Not the best example. That snippet was in use at SGI for years and actually written by Gary Tarolli. Quake's optimization was mostly done by Michael Abrash.

The original id engines were also famously inflexible. They fit the mold of "developing an engine, not a game" to a T. What you saw them do was all they could do. Look at how much Half-Life needed to add to be viable. idtech3 also only broke out of its niche because Ritual and Infinity Ward heavily modified it and passed it around. There's a good reason the engine-based ecosystem is so prominent now.

samiv2• 5 months ago

"Also - study the code of the likes of Carmack. Consider that he produced the likes of the quake engines in only a couple of years. Reflect long and hard on the raw simplicity of a lot of that code."

Also says something about the accumulation of complexity. At that time Carmack (and his team) were able to create a state of the art engine in a few years. Now consider the task today, if you were to create a state of the art engine today it'd take tremendously more work.

direwolf202• 5 months ago

But you could create Quake.

abcde6667772• 5 months ago

An interesting thing is I think a lot of it's caused purely by the graphical fidelity. For instance an animated character back then was just a key framed polygon soup - compare that with the convincing humanoids games have now.

And yet often the actual gameplay code itself may only be 2x to 3x more complicated then the days of old.

I think of counterstrike for instance - it's still just guys shooting guns in a constrained arena.

socalgal22• 5 months ago

I see making a game engine as the illusion of progress on making a game. Making a game engine is fun and relatively easy. You have a check list of things to do. Each of them the solutions are relatively well known. so you do them and make tons of progress. You get a window open, then you get a triangle up, then you get a texture loaded, then you get some basic text for debugging, then you read the keyboard for input, etc etc. each day new stuff comes up and you think you’re making progress but really you haven’t even started making the game , you’re just reproducing what you could have already had if you’d started with an existing engine.

Then you start it hit the more tedious stuff. loading animated characters, blending animations on selective subtrees of a character hierarchy. Making a level editor. Adding quality of life feature to it like undo. Etc…

I’m not saying you shouldn’t do this. It’s fun to do. just don’t delude yourself that that’s making progress on your game. It’s instead making progress on a game engine. That’s a different thing.

I've shipped 18 games, 4 of them AAA. I wrote the engines for most fo them. I wouldn't do it again.

All that said, some nuance. If the game you are making is simple for some defintion of simple, Celeste, Dead Cells, Geometry Wars. Then making your own engine isn't much work and there maybe some benefits.

On the other hand, see all the tiles made with engines. Silksong is Unity. A Short Hike is Unity. Blue Prince is Unity. Valheim is Unity. Peak is Unity. Dredge is Unity. You don't need to make your own engine to make an indie game.

andai2• 5 months ago

Randy (funny gamedev guy from YouTube) said in a recent video that he realized he'd spent the last ten years making engines to avoid the creative terror of action making a game. I'm paraphrasing slightly, but that's what it came down to.

"I thought if I made a really good engine, making a game would be the easy part!" I had similar thoughts when I was younger. Surely if I just upgrade my tools, the hard part will become the easy part!

Jonathan Blow says making engines is easy, because enginedev only takes a relatively small part of development — the game itself takes way more time and energy.

So his argument is, in the grand scheme of things, the engine is not that much work. (Since you're gonna spend ten years working on the game anyway, of course ;)

krapp3• 5 months ago

Yeah don't end up like me with a folder full of library code, "tests", "prototypes" and a dozen implementations of the Tiled API but no game.

For certain personality types I think making an engine can make it very easy to get distracted and wind up in the weeds of something you don't actually need, overoptimizing, fence-painting etc. Using an engine can help with self-discipline and focus on the end rather than the means, although then you need to make sure you don't just wind up with a ton of mostly finished tutorial projects and no game.

andsoitis• 5 months ago

I've shipped 18 games, 4 of them AAA. I wrote the engines for most fo them.

Solo? Or part of a team?

spiffyk2• 5 months ago

I think the biggest mistake you can make is shifting your mindset from making a game to making a game engine. No, you still want to be dead set on making your game, you just don't have the ready-made building blocks from an off-the-shelf engine, so you have to make your own as you go, and only as needed. Personally, when I was working on my little game, I found it helpful to call the endeavour—just like Noel Berry in TFA—"making a game without an engine", rather than "making a custom game engine". I only really wrote the absolutely necessary plumbing that I needed for the game I was making, nothing more.

The same goes for software libraries in general, I think. Just make your program. Don't make an overly general library for something you won't need anyway. If the code proves useful for reuse, just factor it out after the fact and generalize as needed.

EDIT: Typos, wording

doctorhandshake2• 5 months ago

The way I phrase this to myself is ‘make the tool, don’t make the tool that makes the tool.’

__xor_eax_eax• 5 months ago

YAGNI still undefeated in 2026

pibaker• 5 months ago

shifting your mindset from making a game to making a game engine

This reminds me of when someone makes his own static site generator, write one blog post about how he started a blog with his own static site generator, and then post nothing afterwards.

I suspect the reason for this genre of behavior is there is just a tremendous amount of creativity required to come up with anything original enough to justify putting into a game, or a blog, but game engines and static site generators have relatively straightforward feature requirements that you can just implement like any software feature. Building your own game engine or static site generator is just a good way to procrastinate doing the hard part of game making or blogging while still keeping yourself in the game making or blogging zone so that you can tell yourself, yes, I am a game developer or blogger.

zerr• 5 months ago

I believe most of programmers who dive into game dev are actually interested in game engine and tools development.

threethirtytwo2• 5 months ago

AI may change the game here. Most games are slop coded by humans anyway as the industry prioritizes speed and dead lines over code quality.

So having AI build the slop instead of a human seems to make sense. I really wonder how AI is changing the gaming industry.

The articles author strangely left AI out of what he wrote. While I know a lot of HN readers are traditional and love the old way of doing things I don’t know how much longer that way will last.

agentultra3• 5 months ago

It’ll last as long as there are humans who like making things themselves.

spiffyk2• 5 months ago

The indie gamedev scene is full of people for whom games are an art form. These people don't give two hoots about what "the industry" prioritizes, they just want to make their games their way.

Calling their creations slop and suggesting using AI to make them is honestly quite the insult.

vor_• 5 months ago

Also - study the code of the likes of Carmack. Consider that he produced the likes of the quake engines in only a couple of years. Reflect long and hard on the raw simplicity of a lot of that code.

There's a tendency to ascribe the entirety of id's technology to Carmack. Michael Abrash, as one example, was a major factor.

diath• 5 months ago

There's also a middle ground - using a framework that already abstracts away things like graphics, window, audio and input handling but acts as a "bring your own engine" base. This is probably the best if you have a specific type of game in mind where generic solutions wouldn't really work. Things like Raylib, SFML, Love2D and so on are a great compromise.

Madmallard2• 5 months ago

Has he dealt with some of the more challenging problems in game dev that engines help a lot with? Like... multiplayer netcode.

Seems like if you're doing this for a hobby or solo/small team then maybe it's reasonable.

For most people where they want to be a game dev but they probably will just work in industry, it seems like learning the major engines to competency cannot be ignored.

rob742• 5 months ago

Well yeah, he's working with a pretty small team, and quite successfully: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celeste_(video_game)

I would say that one of the "Miscellaneous Thoughts" at the end of your article answers your question pretty well:

I need only the best fancy tech to pull off my game idea

Then use Unreal! There's nothing wrong with that, but my projects don't require those kinds of features (and I would argue most of the things I do need can usually be learned fairly quickly).

jesus_666• 5 months ago

You should use tools that are appropriate to what you intend to achieve. If you want to make a 3D game then Unreal, Unity, or Godot are appropriate choices. If you want to make a 2D game then something like MonoGame might make more sense than Unreal. You don't need highly refined netcode if your game never needs to exchange data in realtime.

Heck, I've seen someone build a visual novel-type game with WinForms. That was actually a sensible choice for the game's presentation and interaction needs.

Of course if you want to become a game dev at a studio then you should be competent with whatever the studio uses (or something comparable so you can pivot to their stack). If you only want to make your hobby project and maybe publish it later it doesn't matter if your engine is Unreal, MonoGame, RPG Maker 2000, or vanilla JS/DOM.

raincole3• 5 months ago

that engines help a lot with? Like... multiplayer netcode.

Rust (the top 10 most downloaded game ever on Steam) is built with Unity. However they ended up to write their own netcode anyway. Of course Unity isn't known for the best netcode, but how much an engine helps is often overstated. Genshin even bought Unity's source code to customize it.

voidUpdate3• 5 months ago

Unity used to have a pretty good netcode implementation, but then they ripped it out in newer versions and still don't really have a good replacement for it

grian42• 5 months ago

multiplayer netcode isnt overly difficult to write unless you're at the highest lvl of complexity lol. it's not a black box, it's just transferring bytes around efficiently and keeping track of state, your "netcode" can literally just be bare tcp (+ssl), validation, and state, it's not that deep.

Madmallard2• 5 months ago

handling latency to keep a coherent experience in a real-time game is an unsolvable problem where every single mechanic requires a planned out scheme and companies go so far as buying data centers in optimized locations to help out with the illusion

that's probably what you mean by highest level of complexity

but even just a regular turn-based game there's a lot of questions you need to answer and decisions to make regarding latency, packet loss, and disconnects that all have to be solved in a coherent and consistent way

kayamon• 5 months ago

How are you handling NAT traversal?

allthetime2• 5 months ago

Netcode is tricky, but it's a solved problem (in terms of practical use). There are many first class examples to base your own work off of.

gethly• 5 months ago

i am making a text editor/ide in Go and i too switched from raylib to sdl. it's likely one of the best graphics layers out there.

lovegrenoble• 5 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celeste_(video_game)

bitwize• 5 months ago

Creating a game with an engine is like designing a character with a pixel dollbase. You can get something out quickly, skipping a few steps because they're done for you, but you have to live with whatever choices were made by the creator of the engine/dollbase. Those choices can constrain your execution and to some extent, your imagination.

charcircuit• 5 months ago

While true, people overestimate how limiting it actually is. It's like wanting to make your own kernel for your application instead of using an off the shelf one like Linux. Sure you might be able to eek out some extra performance but there are so many upsides in reusing Linux.

krapp3• 5 months ago

Those choices can constrain your execution and to some extent, your imagination.

In theory, yes. In practice 99.9% of the games developers want to make are feasible with an off the shelf engine.

jesse_dot_id3• 5 months ago

This was a great read. I'm in my 40's and have mostly done web dev/devops type stuff throughout my career. Making video games has always eluded me even though I've always been interested in it. I think it's that everything feels like a brand new language I have to learn. Perhaps creating an engine is the move.

Cthulhu_3• 5 months ago

I'm no game developer, but I'd say don't create an engine if what you want to do is build a game. Do create an engine if you want to create an engine though.

But yeah, it is like learning a new language. But that's not a bad thing! I found messing around / following some tutorials for e.g. pico-8 to be both liberating (two characters are enough for a variable name) and educative (using functions like min/max to the fullest)

[0] https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

endemic2• 5 months ago

If you're familiar with web development, you can make games with HTML/JS, which is almost its own "engine." Think DOM elements for sprites, CSS animations for movement, requestAnimationFrame for an update loop, etc. This has the extra benefit of zero friction for players -- no native app installation necessary!

jesse_dot_id3• 5 months ago

I have thought about doing this via PhaserJS in the past, but it just never clicks for some reason. I feel like my brain is missing some important component for making game design make sense.

bluefirebrand2• 5 months ago

I'm not quite 40 yet, but I feel the same

I have wanted to make games my whole life but I got into web to make a living. Now it's been decades of game ideas and no implementations, just frustration. Something about unity, unreal, godot just never clicks with me

Maybe I'll try making my own engine too. Best of luck to you, maybe the both of us can make our dreams come true with a slightly different approaches

sgt• 5 months ago

What's the best place to get some cool graphics assets, sound etc when making a love2d or sdl or {yourfavoritetech} game?

armcat• 5 months ago

I've used itch.io before, it's great! I even made a game using some free assets and AI: https://github.com/acatovic/gothicvania-codex-demo

u3612• 5 months ago

Putting as much love into it as you can.

samiv2• 5 months ago

Don't know about "cool" but I always end up going back to opengameart.org

While most of the stuff is one off assets that do not fit together there are also some nice sets by some creators such as Kenney or Emcee Flesher

Also the Liberated Pixel Cup (LPC) stuff is pretty nice.

Mind you I mostly just look for 2D assets.

https://opengameart.org/users/kenney

https://opengameart.org/users/emcee-flesher

https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-collection

kurtdev• 5 months ago

For prototyping I usually use Kenney assets (from kenney.nl). Theres lots of assets for many types of games which lets you rapidly prototype and iterate without worrying about making assets first. For sounds you can use BFXR and just play around. Sometimes playing around with sounds can even lead to new feature ideas :)

krapp3• 5 months ago

itch.io is good for sprite assets and fonts I find.

sbiru93• 5 months ago

Very interesting article.

It's kinda sad SFML never get quoted, It was my framework ( after ALLEGRO ) where i learned c++ and I think it dosen't get much love nowdays even if it is very light and strong

Subdivide8452• 5 months ago

SFML definitely needs more love than it's receiving.

throwaway2046• 5 months ago

I've almost never seen SFML used in the wild. Does it offer anything significant over SDL?

u3612• 5 months ago

Making video games in 2025, sans AI, sans an engine, is harder than some poeple could handle it, and very rewarding: it's like playing Celeste.

roflcopter698• 5 months ago

I read that article a while ago and highly enjoyed it. C# truly has become a very good language for game development and since NativeAOT has become a thing, we will less and less rely on hacks like IL2CPP or BRUTE which transpile the C# IL to C++ such that it can run on JIT restricted platforms like consoles or iOS.

I'd really love to go all-in with C# and SDL3 to make an engine-less cross-platform game but I still miss a good way to make complex game UIs without doing everything from scratch. Does anyone have a good suggestion for making non-trivial game UIs without using a full game engine? So far, I only found https://github.com/vchelaru/Gum and https://github.com/mikke89/RmlUi but I think there's not really something super mature and feature packed, or is there? I'm aware of https://github.com/ocornut/imgui, as the article also mentioned, but that's more for debug UIs, right?

pjc503• 5 months ago

Interested in knowing your modern dotnet gamedev stack. Am I right in thinking that Unity are still stuck in ".NET Framework" era? How is Godot?

roflcopter698• 5 months ago

I myself don't have much of a dotnet gamedev stack going on unfortunately. Although I've been dabbling with MonoGame and have been enjoying it so far. MonoGame matured quite a bit since I previously used it which was more than 5 years ago!

Unity indeed is still using Mono instead of CoreCLR and is kinda stuck in that sense. But to be fair, they are trying to migrate to CoreCLR which will let them profit from all the crazy optimizations that Microsoft has poured into the runtime and ecosystem.

Godot is kind of a hate love for me when it comes to C#. Godot gives me the most hope that there can be a free, community-driven but powerful game engine and it having C# support built-in seems great at first glance until you realize that GDScript, which is veeeeery dynamic language, pretty much nullifies a lot of the advantages you'd get from using C# because you find yourself doing weird type system stuff that GDScript imposes on all the other languages. The best you can do is doing as much as possible in C# and use Godot as kind of a input and rendering abstraction layer. But then you're missing out on a lot of the functionality that Godot offers which should raise the question why use a game engine in the first place. It's difficult, at least for me. Others might have figured it out much better.

S04dKHzrKT• 5 months ago

Stride runs on the latest version of dotnet and c#. I don't have enough experience with it to know its pros and cons though.

https://www.stride3d.net/

roflcopter698• 5 months ago

I see `dotnet watch` being mentioned for code hot reload which is such a great feature for quickly iterating on a game. Not having to restart the whole game just because one has changed a few if statements and values really helps staying in the flow.

But I'm still not too enthusiastic about having GC in C# which is why ideally I'd like to start making a small 2D game just with SDL3 and C++ but how could I get this nice hot reload workflow there? I don't have the money to pay for expensive proprietary tools like https://liveplusplus.tech so what can I do? I guess there's the "game as dynamic library" trick from Handmade Hero (see https://www.youtube.com/shorts/seWAIURXxH0) so maybe that would work good enough? Maybe https://github.com/fungos/cr would do most of what's needed here?

Also, how does one even do modern C++ these days? Is it possible to have big C++ code bases that still compile fast these days? Is CMake 4 good™ now? Are modules really there yet? I rely on clangd as LSP for working with C++ but I read that clangd still fundamentally struggles with C++ modules https://chuanqixu9.github.io/c++/2025/12/03/Clangd-support-f... and it's so bad that there has even been some effort going into making a new C++ LSP https://github.com/clice-io/clice

neonsunset• 5 months ago

.NET also now has an (amazing) alternate low-pause/effectively pauseless GC: https://github.com/VSadov/Satori

Builds: https://github.com/hez2010/Satori/releases

how to use? do self-contained publish (but not single file), replace 3 files in the folder with the one from Satori release you can check if it's in use with GC.GetConfigurationVariables().ContainsKey("SatoriGC")

It is a far, far superior experience to touching anything C++.

roflcopter698• 5 months ago

Oh thanks, that looks very intriguing! The maintainer seems to be a Microsoft employee so there's that? I wonder though, is this a niche hidden gem or really something that more people should consider using? Also, what about compatibility with platforms like Android, iOS or consoles? That'd be very important for gamedev.

dxuh3• 5 months ago

I quite like modern C++, so I really tried to make it work for gamedev, but I think you can't really do it. You can use all the modern C++ features that are not in the standard library though! I am working on a little game the last few months and after a while I just decided to not use any of the C++ standard library (I just use a few C headers) and make my own Vector, Array, Span, String, FlatMap. And using those the game compiles really fast. If I touch a header that is included almost everywhere (the big game state struct), I can compile and link (mold) in ~300ms. If I touch player.cpp I compile in 250ms. That is mostly good enough for me, but I am thinking about the "game code as dynamic library" thing myself.

I always thought CMake was good enough. I use FetchContent for all external dependencies and git submodules + add_directory for all internal dependencies. It took me a while to figure out that this was the simplest thing that works reliably though. I have used vcpkg and conan extensively and have completely given up on them.

I don't use C++ modules, because afaik they are still mostly broken. Without modules clangd works wonderfully and has been working wonderfully for a few years. I really, really like it. I think it can be done! I am missing reflection though, but if I would really want to use it, I'd probably just use clang -ast-dump instead of the new reflection functionality.

roflcopter698• 5 months ago

Thanks for the reply!

I quite like modern C++, so I really tried to make it work for gamedev, but I think you can't really do it.

What exactly do you mean? What parts of modern C++ did not work for you?

You can use all the modern C++ features that are not in the standard library though!
I just decided to not use any of the C++ standard library (I just use a few C headers)

So what do you do with C++ that C alone couldn't do?

cyber_kinetist2• 5 months ago

Note that if you want to go a bit further, you should make your own minimal build system that replaces CMake. That alone will make your project compile much faster!

I've made my own in Python that generates Ninja files only - and it's surprisingly not that much work (especially if Claude Code can help you).

pjc503• 5 months ago

C++ is really not very amenable to this because every change to the contents of a class messes up your entire memory layout. "game as DLL" is definitely a viable solution to that, but so is "game in scripting engine": many games delegate a lot of their mechanics to e.g. Lua precisely because it's so easy to tweak in-engine if you just want to change a bonus from 5% to 10% and so on.

roflcopter698• 5 months ago

C++ is really not very amenable to this because every change to the contents of a class messes up your entire memory layout

I think even `dotnet watch` at some point nopes out when you change too much. I think they call it "rude edit" and ask you to completely restart the program in that case. So I don't expect every possible C++ edit to be manageable by hot reload. But changing a few if conditions or constants should be fine or not?

I'm more and more questioning scripting languages in games. What are the main reasons to use something like Lua? I think it's having not to rebuild the engine, no compile times, changing stuff while the game is running and being more accessible to non-programmers. But I think it's rather infuriating, all those points could be less relevant if the tooling for "real" programming languages was better. And with coding agents becoming more wide-spread I guess accessibility to non-programmers also becomes less of a point. I guess it's just my personal dislike for scripting languages in games, but really, it would be so much nicer imo if there was only need for one language that does it all. But seems like a difficult thing to achieve.

Anonyneko• 5 months ago

You could also offload potentially GC-heavy parts to C++ and write the rest in C#. Depends on the game, but usually most of the game logic that you'll be constantly tinkering with doesn't require all that much memory in the first place.

spacechild1• 5 months ago

If you implement the actual game logic in a scripting language like Lua, hot reloading becomes trivial. sol2 is a really awesome Lua binding library for C++: https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2

roflcopter698• 5 months ago

Thanks for the Lua bindings suggestion!

It's just that I quite dislike using such a scripting language. It's personal preference, for sure, but here's a bit more context https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220602

ps173• 5 months ago

Reading this I realized even for someone who just wants to make games that are fun for him, I find engines very less rewarding to work with. I always loved game libraries that provided utilities to build things but hated do everything ones ( love2d supremacy ). It's great to see experienced and accomplished professionals validating my take :)

I saw this documentary on how celeste was made [1], which completely inspired me and got me into indie game dev community. Unfortunately I haven't made any games as of now that I would proudly showcase but the seed that your effort put is still there and one day I will get back to making games. Thanks a lot for making celeste I absolutely love it! ---- 1. https://youtu.be/MSKOQr_YS-U?si=AGzl5ILzxkoIB-j9

phendrenad2• 5 months ago

Note that this is primarily about 2D indie games. For 3D, it's not much of a question, you probably need an engine.

cyber_kinetist2• 5 months ago

If you throw away photorealism and limit yourself to stylized 3D, using a custom engine can certainly be a pragmatic choice.

The best examples I can think of are Thumper, Devil Daggers, Hyper Demon, The Witness, and No Man's Sky. And of course, Minecraft!

PacificSpecific2• 5 months ago

I generally worked on AAA stuff but the few times I released stuff independently I ended up writing my own framework/engine.

I think the issue was when I used an engine the scope was too large and I never completed the work so I never released the game (or I released it for free because I felt it was incomplete and wasn't worth charging for)

It's great to work in a constrained environment

RASBR89• 5 months ago

A lot of modern games ‘feel’ the same to me now. Same sort of lighting, blur.. even the texture loading and pop in. They all sort of blend into one mess.

I liked when games all felt very distinctly different and I feel like part of that was that they all varied on ‘engine’

boca_honey• 5 months ago

That's the Unity / Unreal look. I can see why that might be a problem, but I actually really like the Unreal 4 look and think fondly about many games using that engine that I like. The way it handles lighting, fog effects and color in general makes me feel "I'm home".

HerbManic• 5 months ago

This is why I am impressed by the works of Enhance Games. Their titles Tetris effect, Rez Infinte (UE4), Humanity and Lumines Arise (Unity) dont show any of the usual traits of those engines. They have done a great job of avoiding the defaults of these engines and crafting something new with the engines as the base foundation.

But I suspect that when you have multiple years to build Tetris, you can spend a lot of time crafting your own style.

allthetime2• 5 months ago

that's because fundamentally, they are the same. Different assets and scripts, same internals / foundation.

baby• 5 months ago

No MacOS version for Celeste 64. I would have thought building something from scratch would have meant that its easier to do multiplatform right?

Levitating2• 5 months ago

XCode licensing might play a part, as well as the need for apple harwdware

hollowturtle3• 5 months ago

To anyone with experience on the matter: I'm looking for making a mobile app which resembles more of a game or "a graphical app" and was looking into tech I could use, all I need is a drawing API I could use cross platform for Android and iOS without much hassle, don't need any OS specific widget/component, I just want to draw stuff on the screen, handle touch input and do some network calls. Possibly with a statically typed language that gets compiled and has good performance. So far I excluded React Native because it's javascript and has too many dependencies(especially with expo) and SDL3 with plain C which seemed a little too much low level to dealing with on a mobile phone. Also tried go mobile but seems unmaintained and gives opengl context which is deprecated on iOS, and finally I'd really liked using Raylib but no iOS support :(. Any suggestion?

newswasboring• 5 months ago

If you are willing to try out Lua there is Love[1]. Supports most common platforms on PC and mobile.

[1] https://love2d.org/

hollowturtle3• 5 months ago

I really like love2d and used prior but lua isn't compiled and network support is limited, although I see they now support https requests on the latest version

arjonagelhout• 5 months ago

I personally use Skia, in combination with a very thin platform layer. I do use C++ so that might still be a bit too low level, but after having set up everything, the Skia API is really nice for just drawing some text / other primitives onto the screen.

React Native uses Skia under the hood as far as I recall.

hollowturtle3• 5 months ago

I'd love to use Skia. Any template/starter I can look for having both Skia and c++ compiling inside xcode/android studio?

hu3• 5 months ago

C# + https://monogame.net

- Desktop: Windows, MacOS, Linux

- Mobile: Android, iOS, iPadOS

- Console: Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch

It used to be XNA but then Microsoft discontinued and the community created the API compatible MonoGame.

Notable games: Terraria (when it was XNA), Stardew Valley, Celeste, Terraria and Fez.

debugnik• 5 months ago

Note than many games have used Monogame on console but FNA on PC instead.

gr4vityWall• 5 months ago

OpenFL should cover your needs pretty well. https://openfl.org

agentultra3• 5 months ago

I’m in the middle of making a game now in C with raylib. Super small in scope. No level editor or tooling needed.

It’s easy for me. I just know C and raylib’s API is small. I got cross platform compilation going in an afternoon.

I’ve worked through some things with Godot. There’s just so much to learn that it’d take me longer to learn Godot than to get running with C.

Feel much the same as the author.

ecshafer2• 5 months ago

For me when there is a library or framework or "engine". You are often having to learn the specifics of how this thing works, and ALSO map your mind to the way it works. When you write things yourself you are only in your own mindset. So you can write your 90% self implementation in less time than learning this new mindset. Then you can build everything together without special ways of piping things together. Adding more frameworks or libraries is an exponential explosion in complexity, and more and more of your time is spent with glue code. When you write everything yourself, you are in one design space and things flow more naturally.

JKCalhoun• 5 months ago

100% agree.

• There is overhead in learning how a specific game engine works.

• Often, due to a game engine API, it seems to herd you into writing the same game everyone else is writing with that engine.

I wanted just enough "game engine" to abstract away the pixel-buffer, windowing, user-events on the various target platforms and then do no more.

"I have been using SDL3 as it does everything I need as a cross-platform abstraction over the system - from windowing, to game controllers, to rendering."

And that is exactly where I landed as well. SDL3 [1] absolutely matched what I wanted. Then again, I enjoy writing sprite-based games. If you want to write a 1st-person shooter though I'm sure you will still want to go with one of the giant game engines.

(Actually it was SDL2 since it was two years ago I was exploring it: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2318420/Glypha_Vintage/)

lasgawe• 5 months ago

A lot of modern games do feel like they blend together visually, similar lighting models, motion blur, depth of field, texture streaming pop in and I think part of that comes from so many titles relying on the same engines. When more studios were building or heavily customizing their own engines, games tended to have a more distinct identity.

zeroq• 5 months ago

There's a huge difference between "making a game" and "shipping a game".

If journey is more important to you than the destination then developing games without an engine can be a great adventure.

But if you bank on shipping your product within budget and scope then you'd better pick up one. Any one. And stick with it.

YesBox3• 5 months ago

I've been working on Metropolis 1998[1] for +4 years now. Custom C++ engine built with a modified version of SFML 2.5 and SQLite.

Creating my own engine was both a personal and strategic decision for me. I was really worried about running into performance issues with generalist engines, and I did not want the friction of working with someone else's mental model. Pretty sure that friction would have caused so much burnout for me. There's also the long payoff of operating in an environment that you understand top to bottom.

I ignored all the advice about making smaller games first, creating an engine first, etc. Metropolis 1998 is my first game and so far it's working out just fine. But your mileage will vary.. I started development with 10+ years of software experience and fond memories of Rollercoaster Tycoon and SimCity 2000/4.

I only add what I need. There's no level/scene editors (outside of the game being one itself :P ). No scene graphs. Shaders are coded by hand. Right now the entire game is about 45MB.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2287430/Metropolis_1998/

megalomanu• 5 months ago

Looks fantastic! Growing up on RollerCoaster (+Transport) Tycoon and SimCity myself, this is exactly the kind of project I'd dream about building, if only I had your dedication!

YesBox3• 5 months ago

Thank you! I'm fueled by passion more than dedication.

Karrot_Kream2• 5 months ago

Curious how long you spent on the "engine" vs just writing the game? Based on the stuff I see on Steam you're pretty far along. I see it's Windows only which makes sense for your goals (and honestly seems very easy to run in a VM.) Was it easier to target and test for a single platform?

(Also thanks this is exactly the kind of game I'm into.)

YesBox3• 5 months ago

A few weeks ago I was curious about this too:

   - - Total days - 1631
   Engine:          610
   Pathing / Roads: 287
   Features:        477
   Marketing:       45
   Burnout:         130
   Other:           82

The game engine is cross-platform ready, but as a solo dev I'm just targeting Windows for now.

You're welcome!

vmykyt• 5 months ago

Your screenshots look dangerous i.e. I'm constantly seeking some hiding aliens there

adwf• 5 months ago

This looks wonderful! After playing Cities Skylines 2 for the last week, all I can say is that as long as you have a half-decent traffic system, I'll be happy!

bombcar• 5 months ago

This is exactly where you need to build your own engine, because using UE4/5 wouldn’t give you the scope you need to run at the size you want.

Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)

Related Stories