What is an engine? Well, this is open to opinion. There’s a rough scale from “library” to “framework” to “general game engine” to “specific game format engine” (pygame, Inform…)
(Of course that leads us to “what is a general game” but not this talk.)
A lot of stuff. ( not gonna type it all. ) can you build all that? Maybe! Start with some frameworks. SDL is open source and modular. There’s SFML. Ogre3d? (On the border between engine and framework.)
Box2d for physics, Tiled for editing. (We’re talking C++ here, that’s a bias.)
The big engines can’t do wild technical innovation because they have to be all things to all people. Can indies be very techncailly innovative? Maybe not by sticking to those engines! We are missing the possibilities of building something custom for a specific goal.
@vfig@zarfeblong@RYStorm I enjoyed this talk but I think it only scratched the surface in terms of the pros and cons. One big pro is that imho it energizes you to make things your own way. You probably have 5 times the amount of things to code, but you eventually can become 5 times more efficient. Dealing with your own problems != dealing with someone else opaque problems. Preaching my own gospel but imho Dear ImGui also makes creation of custom tooling infinitely easier.
@vfig@zarfeblong@RYStorm It’s however clearly a skillset to build that sorts of stuff, i wouldn’t recommend it lightheartedly to people who don’t have existing experience. Maybe good to toy with things on the side before jumping on what bandwagon.
@zarfeblong it's actually an extraordinarily long list of the most successful indie games that built their own tech, even bigger if you count higher level api's like XNA/FNA. (as a matter of fact practically every major indie release of the past 20 years hasn't used one of the major engines)
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