Dana Callista Lexa 🏳️‍⚧️

So often, you're greeted with the splash screen of Unreal Engine or "Made with Unity" when booting up a game, two of the most common game engines today. These are robust and mature engines, but they're not always the best options for independent developers, according to longtime developer Rez Graham. At a GDC 2024 talk titled "A Case for Making Your Own Game Engine," he advocated for building games on your own tech through frameworks and libraries—existing tools that offer some major advantages and, admittedly, some disadvantages developers should be aware of.

Graham has been making games independently under BleachKitty following his work at Electronic Arts on The Sims series. From his perspective and experience, the most popular game engines aren't always the best fit for development, and it really depends on your goals and the type of game you want to make. That makes sense on paper, but he outlined several factors that need to be considered when deciding whether to build your own tech or work with existing engines.

Read our full write-up of the talk at Game Developer.

I appreciate that there's an argument to be made here depending on the goals and scope of your game but also "C++ programmer with 20 years of professional experience says you should roll your own engine" is advice I'd caveat fairly heavily compared to if it was coming from someone in a less technical role

I don't really think any of the problems people cite about game dev YouTube are endemic to YouTube or the YouTube format. Most game dev advice is awful, and most discussions about 'game dev' online are from a profoundly uninformed perspective. Poke your head in /r/gamedev for a sec if you really want to stare into the abyss; it's a truly Boschian hell of the ignorant giving advice to the disinformed.

And the industry doesn't really help this situation. If anything, it makes it worse in several ways.

First, knowledge is actually gatekept. I don't know how we can argue that it isn't when most GDC talks are behind an absurdly expensive paywall – nevermind the expensive ordeal that is attending GDC.

Second, I do think a lot of industry people have forgotten what it's like to be a beginner and are very eager to push people towards solutions that are practical for a real professional team but are not really relevant to someone trying to just make a crappy first game, join a game jam, or develop very basic and early skills.

Third, the industry has done very little to discourage the grifter industrial complex built up around game dev. The industry keeps supporting GDC, an event that is extremely friendly to grifting. It hasn't really done anything to distance itself from the various for-profit schools selling kids on 'game dev degrees' that the industry often doesn't take seriously when hiring.

Before I became a solo indie developer and made games like Chessplosion and Ducky's Delivery Service, I spent over a decade working for other game studios. I was mostly a gameplay programmer at AAA studios (~150 people) and "big indie" studios (~15 people), and I've done some engine/tools programming and some game design consultant work too.

I was going to write a big post on the game production process but I realized that most of it is pretty obvious. You come up with an idea for a game, then you make sure that the idea is good by prototyping its mechanics and planning everything out (also known as pre-production), then you make the rest of the game (also known as production).

It's just like any other type of art. You think of an idea for a drawing, then you sketch it, then you render the final picture. You think of an idea for a book, then you write an outline and a rough draft, then you write the final novel.

The only part that isn't obvious, judging from how I've seen this exact mistake being made over and over again on all sorts of games, is that you shouldn't move on from pre-production to production until you are 100% confident that the game is already good enough. I really cannot overemphasize how important this is. Ignoring this is by far the biggest and most common mistake that I see game developers make, and it is often game-ruiningly bad.

idle thought re that dragon's dogma "travel is boring" post but I wonder how much of the classic sense of "just traveling through a space with nothing to do" that open world games often induce has to do with the 'consumability' of the world design? Like a classic ubisoft style open world game that is just icons on a map? Once you've cleared out the icons, that section of the world is truly lifeless, beyond whatever respawning encounters are present.

I really do feel like, in order to design a world where traversal feels continually meaningful, the world mustn't be a checklist; there needs to be a sense of surprise and wonder in simply walking around, and that means not just nooks to explore but a consistent sense that any time you return to a place it could be different somehow; that a trip, any trip, is a journey with its own unique ups and downs, that you could be waylaid at any moment by anything, even in places you know well. And that's a VERY different allocation of dev resources than filling a space with hand-placed collectibles.

A big thing that I think gets missed a lot about most Japanese open worlds is that, philosophically, in direct contrast to western ones, they're much more directly descended from domestic adventure games than action games beyond maybe basic combat mechanics, when they even have any to begin with. When open worlds started to appear in Japanese games with the PS1 by way of stuff like Mizzurna Falls, Japanese devs, perhaps seeing the challenges in sufficiently populating such environments to fit other genres and gameplay styles, were primarily interested in exploring ways to engender a tangible relationship between players and the environments they're meant to inhabit, which is naturally easier to achieve with slower, more methodical games.

It's why Deadly Premonition, for instance, combines those really long car drives with York's extended monologues, to reinforce the idea that he's operating in a remote American mountain town where the population is scattered and nothing gets done quickly; as a Colorado native who's lived in and around the Rockies plenty, I can tell you, I've gone on plenty of meandering drives exactly like that. It's also why Irem's long-forgotten Pachipara games on the PS2 don't let you drive cars until pretty much the very end of the game, to the point where they're all but useless unless you engage in post-game content. You have to either walk, bike, or take the train everywhere in the meantime; your character is down on their luck and largely impoverished for most of those games and those limited means really impress upon you the urban, working class struggles they're pitted against. (Yes, the pachinko RPGs really explore these themes!)

I could go on and on with examples, but it's very much an approach that you only see when developers are comfortable with taking away players' control over their environments and I think a lot of western devs erroneously conflate complete or even relative player freedom with the format when, narratively and especially experientially, that can be more of a hindrance than an asset, at least if you're looking to do something genuinely different in the space. We're beginning to see people outside Japan come around to that with the Zelda games, which, for as explicitly derived from Bethesda and Ubisoft games as they are on a surface level very much so elaborate on those styles from that same lens. But I think it's fair to say there's yet to be a more widespread recognition that there are more ways to make a big open world than a GTA or a Skyrim or an Assassin's Creed and Japanese games have been investigating that for at least 25 years.