So you want to make a Game Engine!? (WATCH THIS before you start)

So since Unity fucked up.. Hey I'm ready for my own Engine

>make my own cpu >make my own language in it >make my own engine with it >make my game with it >die as a 84yo man who made a pingpong video game

The world needs more engine programming videos, please turn this into a series.

Totally agree with you but I'm like two years deep in building a 2D game engine and your point of "you know the code and don't have to lockup documentation" has turned into "why did I do that again and why is there no documentation" 😂

for me the biggest advantage I get from building my own engine is that script reloading times take around 2ms to reload a 10 000 line csharp assembly at runtime. worth 12 months spent on the engine.

It was really nice to see a video that didn't just conclude with "Don't make your own engine". I think that for some people; it's just more fun to build something from the ground up and it made me sad that people who might get a real kick out of it were just being told "Don't"-before they even really tried. Good stuff :)

Just wanted to learn about game engines a bit and I have to say the quality of your video is top notch. It's not just the video production itself but I can't tell how many times people don't put chapters, timestamps or links in the description and people have to use the comments to fill the gaps. Not only that but you constantly put in easily screenshotable slides for further research and/or reading and I want to say I really appreciate that.

I'm making a game with my own engine, mostly doing it because it's more enjoyable. I don't love all the cruft that comes with the big engines and usually don't need it for most of my games. It's really nice to compile the whole game in like five seconds and just run it.

Great video, I agree with everything you said (also working on a custom engine). It's crazy how monstrous Unreal and Unity became and how long it takes to startup, compile scripts etc even for the simplest projects.

As someone who has built their own game engine (Look up Rank: Warmaster if you care), here is my take away from it: 1. It took many years (read 5) to develop a full 3D engine that handles space flight, RTS, 4X, etc. That means networking/multiplayer, planetary rendering, movement and collision w/ damage model, audio, configurable inputs (including HOTAS, but mouse and keyboard of course), IAUS AI system, VTFS (Volume Tiled Forward Shading), Cascade shadow maps, PBR, Bloom, UI system (ie. windowing, buttons, etc.), 3 scripting engines (one for frame by frame animations, one for campaigns, and one for generic use), etc. Just writing code for importing files/meshes and save/load games is it's own thing. The list goes on, which is more the point I'm trying to make. There is a LOT to be done. Admittedly the game I am building was built along side it, but this was full time. So best to understand your scope and how much time you can spend as well as how good are you really to do it? So if you have that kind of time and money to put those years in, and feel you can, go for it. Otherwise, it can be best to learn an existing engine. 2. C vs C++: Keep in mind that processors aren't getting any faster realistically, however they are adding MANY processors. Because of generally how C++ handles data versus how C handles data, from personal experience, taking your C source and multi-threading it is FAR FAR easier to get full use of the other threads than C++ is able to. ie. DOP vs OOP basically. I went from a single thread loading textures taking 70 second to 16 seconds on a quad core as an example (other things were happening during load, that liked the texture decoding not to be on the main thread). Terrain code bogging down the main thread? Throw it to a different CPU, etc. Movement and weapons fire slowing things down? Throw it on another thread, and it only takes a day to do it. So for me, the performance difference matters. But YMMV. If you can do it, great! More power to you! If you are just starting out, your life will move on and you'll likely never finish it. You'll learn a lot though. If you are a veteran coder and want your next big challenge, a game engine would certainly qualify. So my 2 cents on the matter. I hope I didn't hijack anything.

This video was so nice, straight to the point, informative and fun, I hope this is going to turn into a series

I am extremely interested in seeing you create more engine-based videos or series. I would watch them all (probably multiple times)

nice vid!! motivated me to actually go through with making an engine. Id LOVE it if you were to make more vids about this topic

You are awesome. I was stuck about where to start since I wanted to try to make a game engine. Now I know how to and it is working out quite well. Thank you!

As someone who has been working on an open source game engine for >10 years I have to say this whole video is spot on. It wonderfully sums up everything I would personally convey to someone about game engine development.

My idea is instead of one building an entire game engine, one should consider building a framework FROM a game that one has already made. In that way, code could still be customized and fixed to ones liking; its easier and it is actually: feeding two birds with one piece of bread ( that is, I said this analogy, instead of the violent saying/analogy of "it kills two birds with one stone"). Thus, in building a framework, one could build their game and have reusable code that could be adjusted and used over and over again for each game that one builds. Now, this is the way that I used to make my games back when I learned vanilla Java and JavaScript, because I enjoyed the coding process, the learning process, the bragging rights and other things mentioned in this video.

The most comprehensive videos that point you in the right direction I have seen!

Finally, a fair video on this subject. My second job after a short one of game dev, was game engine programmer for somewhere around 2-3 years. It was the place where I learned tons of stuff. After that I went back to game dev and I felt like I was never learning at the same level. I had the same experience as you had with Unreal, I felt it was really slow for coding, it was killing my productivity because of big compile times, I was literally taking a break while it was compiling. On the other engine(it was not a small one - had most of the popular game engine functionalities, including fully functional editor), I was always opening the project directly with the debugger attached. Game Engine Programming is amazing, a lot of stuff is challenging, but highly rewarding. You can learn tons of programming and you can get in a lot of depth on a bunch of domains - if you want to learn physics you can do it, if you want to learn AI, you can do that too, if you want to design really big systems, guess what, you will have tons of chances.

I think this is one of the best and most easily-digestible videos on game engines out there. Very cool! Definitely agree with a lot of points here like game engines taking a ton of time, but on the same token, damn is it fun and cool when something you've made actually works. And wins you brownie points with other devs too ;) Thanks for the video!

You had more to say than I've grown to expect from these kinds of videos. You're a standout - subbed. I will be watching. :o