Building own engine and tools is not financially viable for 99% of game development companies.

That's too bad. I guess for profit companies won't then and actual decent human people with more incentives in their lives than only profit will continue to do so.

Even without profit in mind: sometimes you just want to build a game.

It's easy to get sidetracked by "the engine" when all you wanted was to create a game... Most amateur gamedevs I know all started creating "the engine" and then the actual game never happened.

I wish to just work on making cool games, but unfortunately my damn landlord and grocery store only care about profit and charge me money every time I have to deal with them.

That position doesn't make any sense to me.

Why should "decent human people" who want to build a cool game be forced to first build an engine for it?

Humans actually need to eat more than for-profit companies do.

You're all (everyone who replied to my comment) assuming that human game developers only develop games so that they can earn money off them. It's HN so that's not weird, pretty much everyone here has their for-profit blinders on. But what if I told you that not all human behavior is done for profit? Including game development.

Not everything has to be "financially viable" and return a profit. The best things in life are made by people without any profit motive at all.

If anything ONLY huge for-profit companies have the knowledge and resources to build their own engines. Without Unity or whatever takes its place thousands of indie devs would never have get off the ground.

Major developers are too focused on things that hardly matter like cutting edge graphics, and hardly interested in things that do like gameplay. Indie is where people are more forgiving, and keeping as much profit matters. Thus in house engine development is a more viable strategy.

I am co-founder of indie game company. Like in any business there is tons of things you have to deal with: hr and managing people, making good game prototypes and pitches, finding funding or publisher, negotiating contracts, crunching for milestones and release.

In case of majorify of indie games you only can only get $100,000-500,000 of funding total for one game with development time of 6-18 months. And like 50%+ of this money will go into creating art assets especially if we talk of pixel art.

Go look what is the salary of senior C++ programmer with experience working with graphics, audio and little bit of everything. And one person can hardly create anything close to game engine tooling unless he work for several years.

Making own game engine is the last any game developer gonna consider.

Thing is you only have to make the engine once. Most publishers just tweak their engine to fit the game over the years.

There are lots of frameworks people can build on. So it doesn't have to be from scratch.

Not to be snide but how many games have you shipped like that? Its really a massive undertaking to build a game engine. Not to mention a distraction as well.

You don't need to build a game engine, though. Just build a game. Game engines exist basically to be able to reuse code across the development of many games.

If you don't worry about writing an engine, and just write games without one, then as a side-effect you'll also be developing the core of an engine that's more specifically optimized for the sort of work that you actually do.

Eventually, it may become advantageous to make that into a formal engine, or it may not. Either way, you're still creating games.

What you describing is only possible for hobby game developers with extremely small scale of a game or development time of 4-5 years. Majority of game developers simply dont have skillset to work with audio, graphics APIs and cross platform support.

> What you describing is only possible for hobby game developers with extremely small scale of a game or development time of 4-5 years.

This is demonstrably untrue. It wasn't all that long ago that there were no game engines available for use, and yet small devs managed to produce a ton of great games anyway. It is true that a small developer is unlikely to be able to produce a grand AAA-scale game in a reasonable time, though.

> Majority of game developers simply dont have skillset to work with audio, graphics APIs and cross platform support.

Then perhaps they should gain that skillset? I would have assumed that any game dev is well-versed in doing these things regardless, but if not, isn't that a problem?

> This is demonstrably untrue. It wasn't all that long ago that there were no game engines available for use, and yet small devs managed to produce a ton of great games anyway.

Audience expectations for production quality of art, animations and overall gameplay has grown accordingly over the years. To become a success game dont have to be best of the best, but it's just cant be much worse than baseline of modern successful games.

If there is any indie games that you like and they were released less than 10 years ago please do a little research of how long they actually took to build. There are reasons why one-guy indie game production take 5-7 years.

> Then perhaps they should gain that skillset?

It's just too many skills and each of them take years of practice. If you take any modern game engine there will be dedicated programmers working on audio, graphics, networking, physics, etc.

If you have group of 3 rock start programmer buddies who can work full time for free then you might have some chances, but I doubt you will have any time left to actually make games.

Also even with your 3 buddies working for free process of making a game costs money. And if you tell the publishers or investors that your company building their own game engine no one will ever invest money into your project.

> If there is any indie games that you like and they were released less than 10 years ago please do a little research of how long they actually took to build.

I know a number of successful game developers that are counterexamples to your thesis.

> If you take any modern game engine there will be dedicated programmers working on audio, graphics, networking, physics, etc.

Right, but that's to make a full engine. I'm arguing that you shouldn't make an engine at all.

Yes, if you're aiming at high production values, then you're looking at millions of dollars of investment and a full team.

But if you're looking to produce an excellent and successful game, the equation can be entirely different. You don't need top-notch graphics, top-notch sounds, etc. You just need to make a great game, and a great game is defined by the gameplay, not by the window dressing.

If you're a one-man shop, it absolutely is major factor in terms of what sort of games you can produce. There's no question about it. But it doesn't mean you can't produce excellent and successful games.

Might as well write a custom language and model editor too. These are all worthwhile endeavors but they are distractions if your goal is the game itself.

>you're still creating games.

No, every moment you're writing or debugging engine code is a moment you're not working on content.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, but for gaming. If the game engine won't let you, say, jump, then the content being generated is limited by that facet of the game engine. So in working on the game engine, and adding the ability to jump, you're unlocking the possibility of new content.

Or you could pick a modern engine, already have those things and focus on the novel content and not the possibility of content.

This is the same argument as "you don't need a web framework, just build the website".

The thing is, by the time the website is done, you have built a framework, and it's worse than all of the existing off-the-shelf frameworks you could've used.

This is my belief as well. In addition (I might be in the minority here) but I can always tell when a game is made in Unity - it has this cheap, plastic feel to it.

> you must build your own game engines and tooling.

From source perhaps