Hacker News Reader

Comment by reidjs | Hacker News Reader

Do you actually finish the games? I’ve tried the DIY game engine approach before, but I never have finished a substantial game before because I get caught up in the weeds.

View on HN

Beware the eternal enginedev... many a brave soul have fallen to this trap.

Developing the engine is so much more fun though.

I think this is why developing emulators is fun. Once you’re done, the games have already been made for you!

The way out is to focus on the game. Only build up the engine to the point the game needs it to be built. The bulk of your focus should be on game logic, even when you take writing the engine into account.

Granted, I haven't finished my game this way, but the engine isn't really the bottleneck. It's deciding on, and implementing, appropriate behaviors, often for silly, fiddly corner cases.

Exactly this. After lots of trial and error I’ve found it easier to build better engines by extracting and abstracting the common elements from my game development process than focusing solely on engine development. Really can’t describe how much my productivity has gone up since I switched my focus by adding constraints to my development process and narrowing my focus to more parochial problems instead of always pondering the general/wider abstractions. It seems that abstractions are the natural consequence of focusing on a narrow and concrete problem, but people instead try to directly jump to the wider abstract space without any bounds or constraints set, and eventually overwhelming themselves.

Sort of :). Most of the games are “technically” playable, but not quite ready for distribution (buggy, missing settings), and I’ve never published.

The main issue is that I make most of the game, then realize that it’s really unbalanced and the controls are clunky and it isn’t that fun. So i lose interest. Probably related, I don’t really enjoy video games anymore because I get bored too easily.

Sounds like you've finished tons of games. The games just happen to be sandbox gamedev games - i.e., the engines themselves. Release the engines!

Also, you could just go work as an engine programmer in AAA or for Unity/Unreal/etc....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com