alt Hacker NewsI believe the instinct to develop a game engine or framework comes down from loving programming and being passionate about mastering a tool. We humans love mastering something and we love masters, when we build something from scratch we own it, we are master of it and we lead the decision. That's so comforting and pleasurable, and the reward we see at the end of the path motivates us. But on the process it's too hard.
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.
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I think we have to try these things at least once. My own attempt to write a javascript framework ended with me realising that I needed to put more effort into planning and research, which was a valuable lesson for me.
What's doomcoding? (It's not mentioned in the article and it doesn't appear to be a related term when I google it.) It sounds negative ("doom" + "we should limit ourselves" from it) but everything you said in the context before that sounds good.
The instinct to make a game engine is it's well known how to do it and you just follow examples all over the the place and each few days you check off a box and feel like you're making progress. It's much easier than making a game itself. There is no known list of do X, do Y, do Z that leads to a game. In that sense, games are harder than game engines because a game is unknown, a game engine is well known.
IF you want to make a game engine, building one is progress
If you want to make a game, building a game engine is the illusion of progress. When you're done making the engine you'll be no further along on your game than if you'd used an existing engine. Usually you'll be behind because those other engines have so many features and tools that you have yet to implement. Sure, you don't need every feature, but you may be surprised at all of the little things you end up having to write.
It helps to just write games and then over time an engine will emerge from the common code you carry across projects.
Starting from a checklist of features for a game engine almost always ends in wasted effort
I dunno if I agree it's doomcoding.
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.