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eniko
@eniko

Kitsune Tails uses a custom engine built on a custom framework all made from the ground up by yours truly. Neither of these were even remotely the bottleneck for development duration. Turns out that the thing that takes the most time when you're developing a game is all the stuff that is hyper specific to that game and can't be generalized anyway

Not to mention all the, you know, actual content that sits on top of the engine. I can write a json parser and serializer from the ground up in a day or two, but all the cutscenes I had to script for KT took many weeks

Then there's the fact that if I'd used an out of the box physics solution for Kitsune Tails I'm fairly certain I'd never have been able to nail the game feel it has, which is the most core thing to the whole experience

You don't have to make an engine but quit pretending doing it is the hard part of making a game. It fucking ain't

TL;DR: the hardest and most time consuming part of making a game by far is making the actual game and anyone who says different is trying to sell you something

PS: I made the engine (including the GUI) for No Way Out from scratch on top of bare WebGL during the Ludum Dare game jam (CW for death/self harm if you do play)


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in reply to @eniko's post:

I suppose the quote exists because it's super easy to get stuck writing an engine in a vacuum. You need a project to write it against, or you'll never "finish". And being finished is also a matter of definition..

In the not-so-distant past, that advice would have sounded like utter nonsense. The trend of engines being made for "games development" rather than "a game's development" is quite new.

Of course, if you are building your own tools, and you put the needs of hypothetical users who might make hypothetical games with them above the needs of you and your game, you're probably doing it wrong.

I think it's sort of true, but not because it's extremely hard: it's just hard enough that it puts some people in a flow state, and you have clear goals like adding support for X file format, implementing a well-defined feature, or improving measurable things like speed and size.
So when it comes time to do hard things with vague goals like "design good gameplay mechanics", "build a fun level", or "write a compelling story scene", it's easy to put it off and dive back into the technical stuff.
This is the case for me, even without making my engine. I have to be careful about budgeting the "fun stuff", like writing new shaders and investigating performance, until after I've done the "hard stuff", like designing a level or writing dialog.