Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine) May 18, 2025
It's 2025 and I am still making video games, which according to archive.org is 20 years since I started making games! That's a pretty long time to be doing one thing...
Screenshot of my website circa 2011
When I share stuff I'm working on, people frequently ask how I make games and are often surprised (and sometimes concerned?) when I tell them I don't use commercial game engines. There's an assumption around making games without a big tool like Unity or Unreal that you're out there hand writing your own assembly instruction by instruction.
I genuinely believe making games without a big "do everything" engine can be easier, more fun, and often less overhead. I am not making a "do everything" game and I do not need 90% of the features these engines provide. I am very particular about how my games feel and look, and how I interact with my tools. I often find the default feature implementations in large engines like Unity so lacking I end up writing my own anyway. Eventually, my projects end up being mostly my own tools and systems, and the engine becomes just a vehicle for a nice UI and some rendering...
At which point, why am I using this engine? What is it providing me? Why am I letting a tool potentially destroy my ability to work when they suddenly make unethical and terrible business decisions? Or push out an update that they require to run my game on consoles, that also happens to break an entire system in my game, forcing me to rewrite it? Why am I fighting this thing daily for what essentially becomes a glorified asset loader and editor UI framework, by the time I'm done working around their default systems?
The obvious answer for me is to just not use big game engines, and write my own small tools for my specific use cases. It's more fun, and I like controlling my development stack. I know when something goes wrong I can find the problem and address it, instead of submitting a bug report and 3 months later hearing back it "won't be fixed". I like knowing that in another two decades from now I will still be able to compile my game without needing to pirate an ancient version of a broken game engine.
Obviously this is my personal preference - and it's one of someone who has been making indie games for a long time. I used engines like Game Maker for years before transitioning to more lightweight and custom workflows. I also work in very small teams, where it's easy to make one-off tools for team members. But I want to push back that making games "from scratch" is some big impossible task - especially in 2025 with the state of open source frameworks and libraries. A lot of popular indie games are made in small frameworks like FNA, Love2D, or SDL. Making games "without an engine" doesn't literally mean opening a plain text editor and writing system calls (unless you want to). Often, the overhead of learning how to implement these systems yourself is just as time consuming as learning the proprietary workflows of the engine itself.
With that all said, I think it'd be fun to talk about my workflow, and what I actually use to make games.
Programming Languages
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