after many years of custom engines, I was cooking up a prototype in Unity, but now I'm considering my next move. redo prototype in old custom framework or some other existing engine. I did gained some perspective during this, so I know I want some sort of ECS framework/lib, mine was 100% object oriented (pros and cons). Regardless exciting things to think about.
@bfd015b1 I'm simplifying it here, but I would say SDL provides a very solid starting point, you get window creation, input and tons of other stuff out of the box. Then you can either roll with their own drawing code, or do your own calls. Audio there's OpenAL, Fmod, SDL_Audio.
I bet there are great videos on youtube about the subject, I also have this real old talk I did a while back, probably still some stuff valid even if outdated maybe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkLJugF9Ew8
for real, these days a 2D engine is not as hard to assemble together, there are several open-source frameworks that will speed up that process a lot. 3D is a different thing, but for 2D it's doable for 1 person only.
I think what people might miss the most in custom engines could be fast to use editors, they are hard to make. But there are things like Tiled (https://www.mapeditor.org/) or ldtk (https://ldtk.io/) that can be used as 2D editors for your own framework. dearImgui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui) can also provide a great resource to build your own tools inside the game itself.
@9e956940@43cb7009 the Plus plan getting removed in favor of the more expensive one is the thing that is more problematic for me immediately, I doubt I'll ever have the 200k threashold issue
@43cb7009 been working on a prototype and now considering if I should rewrite on my custom framework or find an alternative, but unity is not viable anymore in long term for me because I can't trust they won't put more rules that would harm thing even more.
@2c8f7012 at that point in dev I would risk it, odds would be for me that I wouldn't have the $200k issue, the Plus plan gone would affect me more immediately. I have a game in prototype phase and I'm weighing my options atm. Good luck with your project.
to everyone rolling their own game engine & tools, you might have lost more time but you also saved yourself some big headaches now. usually balances itself out.
@038b7e32 there are a few that we have to request access by proving we're a console dev, like SDL etc, but API opening up would be awesome for opening up all of these engines to public.
@6450ba0f I've been cooking someting in Unity after staying away from it for years, now considering going back to my custom framework instead of betting on another engine again, but I'll have to investigate a bit first.
@01b345c5 that is true, but some of them people have been able to port it to consoles, it’s not out of the box but at least there’s a way. Not ideal but Unity is becoming far from ideal as well :(
if you do a shooting game, like any type of shooting game, I'm 100% sure you'll need a resource pool of bullets for reusing once they've done their thing.
scoring inflation. I might be remembering this wrong, but it feels like in the 90s/00's the 10/10 scores for games were more rare, and now there are a lot of them. I see many 10/10 that would probably be a solid 7-8 back in the day. because that was already a really good score. Now it's considered crap.
thanks for all the suggestions so far, I went through all comments (I hope) and gathered them here on a github list so it's easier to share around, feel free to make PR with more things or corrections. There are now both free and license based tools on that list now, but all by suggestions so far.
https://github.com/DJLink/list-of-game-engines-and-frameworks/
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