Although it’s not entirely true that we dropped the engine all together (Discussed later), we have moved most of our development to the Unity Engine. Why we didn’t use our own engine to create our first gameĪfter all this work, you might wonder why we dropped it all and moved to a commercial game engine. Failing to solve the puzzle in time would cause the mine cart to crash as it travelled down each level. Here’s some screenshots of games that we started in our game engine, but were abandoned:Ī puzzle game for mobile requiring the user to solve puzzles before the mine cart reached them. Lastly, we learned which features were most important for us in a game engine – these requirements would later influence our decision to use the Unity Engine. (Again most existing game engines will take care of this for you). For example, you must render transparent models from back to front and it is literally impossible to render intersecting transparent faces without subdividing them. We learned some fundamental limitations with 3D rendering with real-time graphics pipelines like OpenGL and DirectX. For example, how it is best to render all objects with the same model at once or even combine many objects into one and render only sub sections of the larger model – techniques that are usually already implemented in most game engines and behind the scenes. We learned a number of tips & tricks on how to optimize graphics systems for high frame rates. We learned about the rendering pipeline, CPU to GPU bottleneck, multi-threading and how graphics are rendered on the GPU. If you’ve ever wanted to know what happens behind the scenes of a game engine, this is a great way to do it. Now, I wouldn’t say that all this work was a waste of time in fact, I believe that there were many benefits to this endeavour: It only took us a year… Benefits of making your own engine We started strong and with the help of various tutorials from LWJGL, we created an efficient rendering engine which could run phenomenally on all three aforementioned desktop OSes as well as Android. Our language and OpenGL wrapper of choice ended up being Java/LWGJL () for reference, this is the same setup which was used by Notch to create Minecraft. Our main consideration at the time was to have the engine support the big three desktop OSes, Windows MacOS and Linux.
With this in mind, our first task was obvious but not simple, create this game engine. We began with an idea to create a game engine and a goal to publish a game made with it. This is the story behind a year-long attempt at creating a game engine from scratch (within reason). We are the Blind Mystics, a pair of indie game devs from Australia which have been working on starting a (very) small game development business for over 3 years, having published our first game - Lonely Cube () earlier this year.
Why we didn’t use our own engine to create our first game.
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