Comment by throwaway17_17 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway17_17 | Hacker News Reader

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I think in most game development related forums, tutorials, etc, you will be correct about the unpopularity of building a new game engine. However, it’s definitely not a lost cause in general. I also agree that a vast majority of the ‘engines are impossible’ are predicated on Unreal/Unity as a baseline. I look at Arch Systemworks and see them using Unreal for their heavily stylized games (Guilty Gear, Drgaonball FighterZ, etc) and watch the various talks and articles about them having to bend over backward and work to fit Unreal’s expectations to make the engine render and animate in the manner they require and always wonder if a custom engine would not make workflow and maintenance simpler. I wonder the same for more specific genres, like RTS and HD2D-style JRPGs, where a custom engine would conceivably be a better long term option for developers. I always go back to Mike Acton talking at the first HandmadeCon, where he is talking about small dev teams and their benefits in specializing tools and wonder if that logic should be applied to engines as a whole.

Exactly! Good point about forums/tutorials/courses pushing unification.

And interesting, Mike Acton's point goes all the way back to the late Fred Brooks. Not the popular main topics of MMM, but the "Surgical Team" chapter, where he mentions that there should be someone taking care of the tooling. Now, in 1974 this could have been a person. In the 90s game studios it was common to have specialized teams building reusable tooling. This seems to be disappearing.

If I had to guess it becomes a question of how easily can you replace/train up new people to be proficient with the engine/maintain it. Fighting game engines are probably the simplest game engines there are to make but new people still need to be onboarded on it, the knowledge will be internal mostly, you can't find people with knowledge in $propietary_engine to hire right off the bat let alone maintain it. Capcom will use I believe their RE engine for sf6, already used it in dmc5 replacing MT Framework so it's not like it isn't happening in some places, but the AA developers where most of fighting games sit probably can't justify the costs to train and maintain a proprietary engine versus the cost of dealing with roadblocks in UE.

I definitely agree.

My original point, that was not well articulated at all, was more that there should be a middle ground. The choice shouldn't be only between "homegrown engine" and "Unreal/Unity oligopoly".

I'm saying there should be much more competition when it comes to third-party engines, but also in third-party tooling and third-party middleware.

And this competition should be more specialized in order to demand less of the "train and maintain a proprietary engine" but also less of the "dealing with roadblocks in UE".

HD2D games are made in UE4 and they seem okay with it.

(A lot of people think it's a custom engine though.)

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