Making Video Games (Without an Engine) in 2025

Summary

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...