So, you want to make a game engine (2023)(lisyarus.github.io) |
So, you want to make a game engine (2023)(lisyarus.github.io) |
That said, despite making a bunch of demos[2][3][4][5] since 2021 when i made the game, i never made any game using it after that as i always lose interest - perhaps i do need to be making an engine from scratch to keep myself interested :-P.
[0] http://runtimeterror.com/tech/petra/ (note the version is very old and i've made a lot of improvements since then - this includes the Codeberg repository which i'll move somewhere else at some point)
[1] https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra
[2] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/iv/images/44d7537fb719e00fdcd...
[3] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/iv/images/d22ff83dd5e5109e02e...
[4] http://runtimeterror.com/pages/iv/images/1da6a4bce430a8d8507...
you're not the only one. jonathan blow has made tons of money selling games and also needs to write a whole programming language for 100h to keep him interested enough to yield 1h of content.
i can't really say much about the people who say don't program game engines (or whatever thing they don't like) in terms of opportunity costs (a generous name for this category of complaining), other than they would be bad at both making art and making money.
Nowadays I have the urge to combine a physics engine, rendering engine, ecs engine to develop my own game which I guess I'll quit in the middle.
As developers I believe we should limit ourselves from doomcoding.
Sure, trying to make a thing you don't know how to make will most likely end up with you not making it, but that is the case for pretty much everything.
I have worked briefly in the game industry long ago (not in engine teams though) and ended up writing a few engines for myself after leaving, a couple quite complete.
It’s just a hobby like another. I have zero interest in writing a full game on top of it, or even publishing it.
But do you know who NEVER gives me grief about it? People I know who work at Unity or [previous employer] writing AAA engines.
My last monstrosity is a Rust one with zero dependencies other than the std-lib/OS, Metal/DX12/Vulkan, its own physics engine, spatial audio, vm for scripting and other stuff. I will probably do nothing with it other than having updated my skills in a lot of areas.
Once I tried to create my own front-end framework from scratch. I created signal library, mounting/unmouting, context etc but never able to write v-dom diffing or using existing vdom libraries.
Then I decided just implement my API on top of Preact. Preact did vdom-diffing for me and mounting/unmounting which was enough for my need.
The final project looked nothing like Preact, it even had it's own context system, data loading, signals, setup + render and context which just hooks itself into Preact Context but taught me a lot about how a front-end framework work.
That said, it's still a worthwhile exercise that one can learn a lot from.
Do we want money or do we want to get the pleasure of being an engineer and make money as a side quest?
There was a video of tsoding about why he doesn't have a job, he says "when I have enough money for my needs I just go into coding instead of working". I like his vision. He likes coding for the sake of programming and earns money as a side quest.
