I've been making video games in some form for 20 years, so I wrote an article about my process - and why I don't use an engine. noelberry.ca/posts/making... - ThreadSky

noelfb.bsky.social • 8 days ago

I've been making video games in some form for 20 years, so I wrote an article about my process - and why I don't use an engine.

https://noelberry.ca/posts/making_games_in_2025/

Comments

jeanmakesgames.bsky.social•7 days ago

That was a good article, i've read it entirely and it match very well you're mentality since the time i started to follow your work (around march 2018). I would love one day that you write something about how you actually learnt to build your game engine (tilemap editor, etc), the process, etc :)

muffinlord.bsky.social•8 days ago

as someone starting out entirely in python and pygame i kinda needed to hear all this, thanks

muffinlord.bsky.social•8 days ago

not that i'm thinking of going this hard on custom tooling(i'm literally exporting from aseprite to png because pygame doesn't support ase files natively and i'm not versed enough to fix this (YET)), but it's good to know that commercially viable games can still be built by mortal hands

noelfb.bsky.social•8 days ago

Yeah! I meant to include pygame as well - I haven't used it personally but it seems like a great option for makin' stuff in python :)

muffinlord.bsky.social•8 days ago

It's working out for me so far! I'm sure I'll hit some kind of pygame-specific limitation eventually(blitting text boxes as subsurfaces is starting to get old already and i've barely put text in my game yet), but it's amazing how much it's willing to put up with. There's also decades of docs on it!

costelinhadougref.bsky.social•8 days ago

I bet that you would love it if you tried it one day, but at the same time it all depends on your vibe, specially considering how much you already seem to love working on C# and SDL3.

But if you ever fancy trying some new stuff or just making a really quick prototype, it can be really good.

costelinhadougref.bsky.social•8 days ago

Pygame is great

firsthour.net•8 days ago

this is really great to read, fantastic perspective

gianmichele.bsky.social•7 days ago

Very interesting read, thank you for putting this together.
I'm curious about your vscode and dotnet core setup. Having almost no knowledge of the ecosystem, what kind of toolchain are you using? I tend to shy away from anything with complex build systems and similar.

noelfb.bsky.social•7 days ago

I just use the default C# extensions in vscode. I run my projects either through vscode (the extension adds a debugger) or through terminal (dotnet watch).

C# isn't really like C++ where there are a lot of different build systems - it's standardized with .csproj files.

macabrett.bsky.social•8 days ago

I think people sometimes underestimate how much fun it can be to create your own tools. Sometimes I wonder if I'm building tools so I can make a game or if I'm making a game so I can build tools haha.

noelfb.bsky.social•8 days ago

Yeah I have definitely had occasions where I'm having "too much fun" making tools and have to remind myself to actually work on the game, lol

costelinhadougref.bsky.social•8 days ago

Honestly the only reason why I never made my own tools, is because I always felt intimidated by that idea, specially when I think of the idea of pausing development in my game to do that, and many of these tools can get pretty complex... But maybe it's just me.

xot.bsky.social•8 days ago

I've enjoyed being a mediocre C# coder for the last few years, but I want to move on from MonoGame. It gave me a start for my first real C# project, but I use very little of it, and some low-level things are harder than they should be. I should give SDL3 a try. Did you roll your own C# bindings?

noelfb.bsky.social•8 days ago

I am using these bindings, which seem to be the most complete and lightweight (a single file) https://github.com/flibitijibibo/SDL3-CS/

cornucopic-studios.bsky.social•8 days ago

This was such an inciteful read and everything we stand for at Cornucopic Studios. Thank you for this article!

bumbleborn.bsky.social•8 days ago

I can't wait to have more time to play with foster, I defo wanna move to engine-less dev over time!

gingerbeardman.com•8 days ago

I'd say you're engine-less already!

bumbleborn.bsky.social•8 days ago

For playdate games yeh 😅 the Echo port is in unity tho cause I'm comfy in it and consoles will be a bit easier.

I've got a few unity games to finish, but I'm defo transitioning out of it, probs godot for 3d and foster for 2d!

gingerbeardman.com•7 days ago

that’s surprising, given that Playdate SDK is based on Love2D. In my experience all the SDK-agnostic Lua code can stay the same and the graphics/libs calls are all pretty straight swaps. I can only imagine you have bigger plans than a one-to-one port!

bumbleborn.bsky.social•7 days ago

It was partly just cause I missed c# but I am also doing a bit of shader stuff, plus I've implemented the steam api in unity before so it had the least unknowns for me

I do wanna give Love2D a proper try at some point tho!

gingerbeardman.com•7 days ago

I hear you on C#. Both shaders and Steam API are already solved in Love2D. Adding shader is very easy, I’ve used them in all my recent Love2D stuff.

BTW are you going to Liv Game Summit 2025? https://investliverpool.com/news/liverpools-games-industry-gears-up-for-liv-game-summit/

gingerbeardman.com•7 days ago

* based on = heavily inspired by (sorry)

costelinhadougref.bsky.social•8 days ago

Honestly, the only reason I don't try Foster or C# with SDL3, is because I remember having some pretty bad experiences with intellisense on C#, at least on VS Code. Granted, I'm no longer using VS Code, and I'm on Linux now....

bumbleborn.bsky.social•8 days ago

I use rider and I had a few but they were related to the version of rider not supporting some the latest c#, as soon as I updated it's been a breeze!

alektron.bsky.social•6 days ago

I just recently wrote a little game from scratch in just ~3200 LOC. It's up on GitHub as a learning resource:
https://github.com/alektron/ChunkMinerGame

noelfb.bsky.social•6 days ago

awesome, that's really cool! :)

jodavaho.io•7 days ago

Great article! Glad to see SDL + Linux are goto options for gamedev.

pixxeria.bsky.social•7 days ago

📌

chounard.bsky.social•8 days ago

Dang it, Noel! Now I'm really tempted to rewrite everything in C#. :)

I started this project in C++ specifically for portability, but the AOT stuff sounds like it wasn't necessary. C# is super comfy.

Did you write a spritebatch system on top of SDL GPU? Have you tried building for the web at all?

noelfb.bsky.social•8 days ago

Yeah, I did originally have this game in C++ and ported it back to C#.... which was a fair amount of work, but worth it for me. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it if you're in a comfortable place with your project, though.

noelfb.bsky.social•8 days ago

And yes, I have a little sprite batcher on top of SDL GPU. You can see it here, although it doesn't make any direct calls to SDL GPU as those are done through a little C# graphics api I wrote over top of it: https://github.com/FosterFramework/Foster/blob/main/Framework/Graphics/Batcher.cs

noelfb.bsky.social•8 days ago

Oh also for web stuff: I have but the state of C# in the web is... very finicky. It sort of worked, sort of didn't, depending on the day and the weather outside.

Also SDL GPU does not support opengl or webgpu at the moment. I had my own opengl implementation for a while but dropped it.

chounard.bsky.social•8 days ago

Ah, gotcha. Thanks for taking the time to respond to all of that!

01010111.com•6 days ago

Hell yeah

ohcoolawesome.bsky.social•8 days ago

great read, ty!

bigaston.me•8 days ago

Everytime you talk about C# I'm like "I want to learn this language more and try to understand how to create my nice stuff with it" ahah

But Godot fit better for me!

noelfb.bsky.social•8 days ago

Yeah, Godot is fantastic! :)

costelinhadougref.bsky.social•8 days ago

To be fair, you can use C# with Godot, so....

bigaston.me•8 days ago

With Godot I'm only with GDScript!

costelinhadougref.bsky.social•8 days ago

You need to download the .Net version of Godot to use C#

bigaston.me•8 days ago

I know ahah

huedev.me•8 days ago

Your timing couldn't be better! I've been tinkering with making games without an engine for the past few weeks so it's nice to see your thoughts and processes. Great article!

nyako.gay•8 days ago

this is awesome! ive been struggling with finding a good framework (love2d is great but im sick of no classes in lua or the issues that come with class implementations), and i settled on wanting to use c#, sdl3 and nativeaot for console -- its awesome seeing my decisions backed up like this!

nyako.gay•8 days ago

it's kind of exciting to know that i've picked a good path haha. either way, very nice read and i always love learning about gamedevs processes!

thope.xyz•7 days ago

The points about C# are pretty tempting... I used it in unity a while back and the visual studio integration felt better than C++. Would be interested to hear about any experience using it for engine code in a 3d project

dizzylara.bsky.social•8 days ago

this was an awesome read, Noel! Thanks for sharing!

encelo.github.io•7 days ago

Nice article! I can really appreciate your point of view, being an engine and rendering programmer in the industry who has always worked with custom technologies. 😉

Since 2011 I've been working on the nCine, my open source cross-platform 2D game framework. 💪
https://ncine.github.io/

itsdanott.bsky.social•8 days ago

Thanks for the article - it was a great read! What’s your opinion on learning SDL_GPU after getting into GFX programming with various OpenGL versions?
Would it be better to learn a bit of D3D11 beforehand, or is it achievable to dive right into SDL_GPU without knowing any other APIs besides OpenGL?

noelfb.bsky.social•8 days ago

I think if you have a moderate understanding of OpenGL, going straight to SDL_GPU will not be bad. It's more complicated in some ways, and simpler in others, and I find the SDL docs to be quite good. This examples repository is also great: https://github.com/TheSpydog/SDL_gpu_examples/

itsdanott.bsky.social•8 days ago

Thanks - that’s the second time I’m stumbling over this repo this week - will definitely check it out!
For me especially the shader situation seems a bit hard (e.g getting into hlsl without knowing DX / Vulkan style glsl without Vk experience)
But yeah you gave me confidence to simply try it out :)

noelfb.bsky.social•8 days ago

Yeah I think shaders are the trickiest part of SDL_GPU right now. I would recommend downloading the prebuilt SDL_ShaderCross tool (https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL_shadercross/actions) and also making sure you follow the binding rules: https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/SDL_CreateGPUShader#remarks

butskyi.bsky.social•7 days ago

Can I learn experience in game development from you?
I love to build game and have experience in Unity, Roblox ,GTA V...

voik.bsky.social•7 days ago

Cool read :)

sebastienphaneuf.bsky.social•7 days ago

Thanks for this post. Really nice content. I really love when dev take time to write a post (And not record a video) :) Long live blog posts!

noelfb.bsky.social•7 days ago

I almost started this as a video, but then realized I wanted to cite a lot of resources and it just made way more sense as an article haha

feresr.bsky.social•8 days ago

Thanks for writing this!! I am using rust and I think it's overkill for my purposes. I might give c# a chance. Have you noticed any performance impact running your games in a managed (gc) language ?

noelfb.bsky.social•7 days ago

I think the GC is probably the biggest "issue" with C# for me still - but I'm just careful about how much "garbage" I'm producing during gameplay, and run the GC between scene transitions, which seems fine.

feresr.bsky.social•7 days ago

Thanks for the reply! The GC should behave as long as you pre-allocate and clean after every frame, I suppose. Arenas might help with that.
I will give Foster a try! (after I'm done with my project) - thanks for making it open source!

noelfb.bsky.social•7 days ago

Yeah I do pool stuff that needs to be allocated every frame, when possible, to reduce impact when actually playing. I'm not generally as careful on menus and stuff because you wouldn't notice it.

echowritescode.bsky.social•8 days ago

it's really encouraging to see someone so distinguished in gamedev mirror my own thoughts about this stuff c: cool article!

morgan3d.bsky.social•8 days ago

You convinced me to try C# again!

hamnesiac.com•7 days ago

Good read and guide. I'm coming off of years of server dev'ing a dead mmorpg... moving into solo... starting from scratch, using Godot to organize my projects and just get it done right now. the next step for me is what you are talking about.

ikarius.com•8 days ago

Thanks for that. Really useduk for a wannabe game-coder like me

ltrlynick.bsky.social•8 days ago

Fascinating read. I am experimenting with Unity and Godot right now for educational purposes after using GameMaker for a while, but world of frameworks have always fascinated me. If anything, I'd say that this article really made me more interested with experimenting on not "using an engine".

costelinhadougref.bsky.social•8 days ago

Yay, articles :)

costelinhadougref.bsky.social•8 days ago

Also, game dev without engines is pretty fun, if harder, that's basically how I started, using engines is fine, but it just doesn't feel the same when so much of your work is offloaded to a piece of software that you barely know how to use.

noelfb.bsky.social•8 days ago

Yeah. And for what it's worth, I'm not advocating for everyone to make games this way - this is just more about the workflow I have slowly moved into, and what I find works for me best!

costelinhadougref.bsky.social•8 days ago

Yeah, your article made that pretty clear indeed.... also love the aditional trivia about Celeste's development there.

You mentioned that you and your team didn't have much 3d experience when making Celeste 64, which was also made using a framework, do you have any suggestions for learning 3d?

noelfb.bsky.social•8 days ago

I think for 3D I found this the most useful - it's about opengl but the concepts of how 3D rendering works can be translated to most 3D APIs or libraries: https://learnopengl.com/

costelinhadougref.bsky.social•8 days ago

Oh, cool, thanks

costelinhadougref.bsky.social•8 days ago

Also I find it pretty cute and wholesome how Liam went for having little programming experience to programing boss-fights on his own.... talk about a character arc there, Liam is the goat. (I need to learn to make boss fights one day, but so far I haven't made any game that requires them lol...)

maxipaille.bsky.social•7 days ago

Thanks for your article.
I would add Unity/UE are very slow editors. It take at least 30s to load, 10s to reload the assemblies. Any file change produce an asset reimport. […]
It scales with project and team size at a point where it is not negligible time.
Godot is currently better on this topic.

intangiblematter.net•6 days ago

Great article! I've been playing around with SDL and Raylib lately because some programmer part of me wants to use a custom engine because it sounds fun. Sadly, GDScript is my favourite language and I'm loathe to leave it behind

intangiblematter.net•6 days ago

That said, I've been a Godot user for coming up on five years now, and even though I suspect you're more interested in exploring it on your own, if you ever need any help I'm more than happy to provide :p

noelfb.bsky.social•5 days ago

Thanks! Definitely will keep this in mind when I mess around with it!

alex-finley.com•7 days ago

This was a nice read. Game development has always fascinated me but I always get frustrated with the game engine UIs so this article seems on par. It would be great if you ever had the time to write up a small tutorial on your process.

noelfb.bsky.social•7 days ago

that could be fun, I'll think about doing something like that in the future!

nderyappo.bsky.social•7 days ago

Thank you for good read! Many years ago I find Love2D optimal tech for my gamedev needs and it still serves me well.

enyard.bsky.social•8 days ago

📌

veser.bsky.social•8 days ago

ouughh this is some good shit thanks man :)

cristei.bsky.social•8 days ago

"You can allocate dynamically sized arrays on the stack! C++ can't do that (although C99 can ;) ...)."

Actually, you can, by just implementing a custom allocator, (and it's pretty trivial ;) ...).

noelfb.bsky.social•8 days ago

That's true! I hadn't considered using a custom allocator, good call!

gingerbeardman.com•8 days ago

I use Lua & Love2D to make games with a similar ethos. Being able to set my own constraints is fun.

My game YOYOZO is a tiny 39KB but made it to Ars Technica's "Best Games of 2023" list alongside heavyweights like Super Mario Wonder and Tears of the Kingdom! https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2023/11/21/yoyozo-how-i-made-a-playdate-game-in-39kb/

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