Game Development: Rolling Your Own Engine?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 11, 2014

This weekend in the indie game developers group on Facebook, a vocal minority (very much a minority) ventured “opinions” disparaging developers who don’t build their own game engine from scratch. The predictable crapstorm ensued. Mainly it was troll-feeding and simply fun to pile on, as these Internet arguments often go.

Now, ignoring for the moment the fact that any “opinion” used to put others down is really just vanity, I’d like to talk about this for a moment. If you followed my post from last week about GameMaker, you can guess what I’m going to say.

I wrote my own 3D engine for my first commercial indie game. It was a challenge, and it was also fun. It was nifty getting my hands dirty with trying to optimize collision detection, the rendering pipeline, and so forth. As a programmer, it’s awesome. After that experience, however, I realized that I’d rather write games than engines.

As a gamer – I really don’t care how a game was made. Sure, if you showed me the trickery and shortcuts behind the curtain, I might be somewhat disappointed, because the magic is gone. Or, like the sausage factory, I’m a little grossed out realizing what’s in it. But in the end, all that really matters is having an entertaining product.

Amateurs and the self-conscious seek to impress their peers. Professionals seek to impress their audience.

Now, it’s very cool if a developer *can* and *does* write their own game engine. That’s awesome. And there are cases where they probably should. Especially now that we are back to supporting less powerful devices (mobile), a custom engine allows us to make some optimizations that are just not possible in a general-purpose engine. I’ve seen efforts to provide Minecraft-style visuals in Unity, and so far I haven’t seen one that impresses me.

But if you do go back and create an engine of your own “from scratch,” how far back do you go? Is it okay to use a powerful, high-level SDK? Or do you have to go down to the metal yourself, writing your code in machine code? If so, you are unlikely to complete your game before the  platform becomes completely obsolete, but good luck.

Obviously, it gets pretty ridiculous to draw the line too far back. Which, to me, illustrates why the line doesn’t shouldn’t exist at all. If your hobby is creating graphic demos, or writing in assembly, or creating game engines, or writing games for obsolete systems, or any other works of technical prowess, then by all means, go for it! I think it’s cool! But if you are a game developer, making games for a more general audience than just “other developers who appreciate stuff written in assembly,” then you should start at whatever point makes the most sense for their game. If it’s a high-level, genre-specific platform like RPG Maker that lets you do your thing just fine, take it and run with it. If you are making a game for an Atari 2600 emulator just for kicks, you are probably going to have to make friends with machine language.

It’s always all about the audience.

 

 

 

 

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