Why Build Your Own Game Engine? The Data Says It Still Pays
What You Gain by Building Your Own Game Engine
Despite the dominance of Unity and Unreal, custom engines still power 43% of game sales. This post argues that building your own engine—even a game-specific one—offers deep learning and independence. The author shares examples from his own games and teaching, showing how understanding engine internals like cascaded shadow maps and occlusion culling leads to better optimization decisions.
You think you can just make something better than Unity or Unreal (or Godot or GameMaker) in general. You can’t. It’s possible to make something that is better than these for specific use cases […], but you, as an individual or a tiny team, are not going to compete with these for general purpose stuff.
- KronisLV
I'm reminded of the story of Randy, that I watched unfold over quite a few months - he couldn't help himself but to work on new features, rewriting existing features, hacking to make his workflow better, but really struggled to release anything, like a form of bikeshedding where you are actually still productive, except what you produce doesn't seem to meaningfully get you closer to shipping at all.
The videos that document the journey probably haven't gone anywhere:
https://www.youtube.com/@randyprime/videos
https://www.youtube.com/@randyprime2/videos
If you want to make an engine and learn about making engines - make an engine.
If you want to ship a game - think long and hard about whether an off-the-shelf engine wouldn't be a better investment of your time (because you wouldn't invest hundreds or thousands of hours making something bespoke and could actually make the features you need within an existing engine).
I suspect that with the great FOSS and source available engines we have, like Godot, there will be plugins for msot things and folks will be able to make their own without having to start from scratch (unless they really want to), like the most competent terrain implementation for Godot so far is a plugin - https://tokisan.com/terrain3d/
Hell, maybe also contribute to lesser known engines if you feel like it: like jMonkeyEngine, Flax (it's great, like a lightweight and 3D oriented Unity / Unreal with a footprint closer to Godot and a nice C# integration), Stride an […]
- avaer
There's a game version of the Whorf hypothesis; the engine limits the kinds of games that are thinkable. Unless you are the kind of person that has shipped your own engine, you probably don't even realize the thousands of little decisions that are forced on you. Which is why so many games look and play exactly the same.
According to my research, Steam success is somewhat correlated with making your own engine. Novelty and standing out from the crowd are the things that sell your game. It's a lot harder to do new things if what you can think is limited by your infrastructure.
Still, don't build your own engine. Build your game; the engine comes out of that.
- poetril
I understand that making a game engine is often at odds with actually making a game, but does anyone know of good literature on building one from scratch? Ideally something like crafting interpreters but for an engine. It’s been on my list for quite a while.
- bashmelek
As a hobbyist, I also dislike how standardized the notion of a “game” has become. The big name engines feed into this with the biases built into them to help facilitate making these sorts of games, and then the notion of an “engine” gets similarly restricted. But a game can be any sort of joyous program.
- tancop
Where do you put modular engine/framework hybrids like Bevy? It owns the game loop so it's technically an engine but you can swap out just about every part of it, even rendering and window management. Tiny Glade only used the core ECS with every other part being custom.