Item — HN Reader

> EDIT: And yeah, I'm tired of people collectively shitting on other people's project in HN without even looking at it, or without considering why not having monocultures is good.

The person you replied to simply wrote the following, which seems like the opposite of shitting on the project this post is about:

"The benefit of engaging with a project like this is that you gain a very plausible set of excuses that can be leveraged when you find out that making the game is the actual hard part. Firing up godot/unity/unreal eliminates an entire universe of reasons for why you haven't shipped more content today. Tools that "just work" can feel like brutal exposure when you don't have a creative vision to follow."

Not meaning to argue; maybe we're just getting our lines crossed.

2 comments

It does not read like a compliment to me. What the person seems to be saying in a rather patronizing and opaque manner is that building a game engine gives you an excuse to avoid building a game, thus framing it as an exercise in avoiding hard work or needing to be creative.

In reality however, many people whom I know who built a game engine did it for a plethora of different additional reasons:

- Learning C++, OpenGL, and other tech

- Similarly, learning a new language

- Learning how a game engine works, by building one, and perhaps a better one afterwards, or for developing skills to work on existing engines

- Just because it is fun and you get a high from it

- Building an environment tailored to how they would like to build a game, e.g. because existing engines don't cut it in that regard. Basically building your own tool(s).

- Building tools for others, so that they can build cool things, because you get satisfaction from that.

- Building a new engine because existing large engines have gone stale for some reason (an attempt at becoming the next big engine that structurally solves the tech debt problems that the status quo ones developed over time)

- Similarly, building an engine that has a new paradigm as first-class citizen, e.g. ECS

- A combination of any of these.

I had a similar mindset in the past, not understanding why anyone would like to build their own engine and not a game, because it happened very often and I was the one who liked to build games. Now I do see that there's more to it than just the product it is supposed to create. I learned that when I got into tool development, and noticing that I got a lot of satisfaction from building tools that other people can use well.

Reducing it to a "plausible set of excuses", among other things, is what I mean by shitting on other people's passion project. Saying that the "firing unity/unreal/godot" is what I mean by preferring monocultures.

EDIT: Writing an engine is difficult and time consuming, but also rewarding in several ways, and requires a completely different skill set from writing a game. It's incredibly patronizing to call it "an excuse".

This is similar to asking someone making an image editor to "just open photoshop, you're making excuses for not working on art".