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[encelo]

It has been a couple of years since I first started collecting a bunch of indie games (mostly 2d, in pixel art and made by small teams) with an emphasis on the ones made with custom tools and engines.
I was looking for both ideas and motivation to start a project using nCine, my open source cross-platform 2d game engine, so I categorized them by the technology they used.

Well, I haven't yet started any game project as I am trapped in the "let's add yet another feature to the engine" problem () but at least I have found some time to convert the list from a thread on an Italian gamedev forum to a fully fledged Google Sheets document.

Let me know what you think and please don't hesitate to comment if you spot any mistakes or if you would like to see a game added (but I don't guarantee anything ).

THE LIST

[Golds]

We made The Hunger Games: Girl on Fire in the custom C++ Doomlaser Engine..





Of course, for iOS only

Also, Tigsource legend Owl Country, is written in its own straight C engine, for PC & Mac

[Schrompf]

From my experience a engine made from scratch without an accompanying game is doomed to fail due to misdesign. You better start an example game right now to find all the flaws where your engine is cumbersome to use in real-world scenarios.

I did custom engines all my life, my games on Steam are Splatter and Crossfire II - the latter being an ancient Amiga game blitting sprites in software.

[encelo]

We made The Hunger Games: Girl on Fire in the custom C++ Doomlaser Engine..
Also, Tigsource legend Owl Country, is written in its own straight C engine, for PC & Mac

Can you find some sources online for more information about the technology they used?

From my experience a engine made from scratch without an accompanying game is doomed to fail due to misdesign. You better start an example game right now to find all the flaws where your engine is cumbersome to use in real-world scenarios.

I have a couple small games (the classic pong and space invaders clones) and a couple tools (particle editor, path tracer, animation editor) but I agree it needs a game. The thing is I would like to have other users creating games with it, so I can focus on the technology.

I did custom engines all my life, my games on Steam are Splatter and Crossfire II - the latter being an ancient Amiga game blitting sprites in software.

I have been an Amiga user for ten years, long live the blitter!
Did you always work as an engine programmer for Dreamworlds?

[Schrompf]

Did you always work as an engine programmer for Dreamworlds?

I am Dreamworlds. So yes, I also do engine programming. There have been other coders in earlier years, notably my twin brother, but most of time it's just me.

[encelo]

I am Dreamworlds. So yes, I also do engine programming. There have been other coders in earlier years, notably my twin brother, but most of time it's just me.

I visited the website and I had this feeling already.

I was just curious about the "all my life" expression: were you always working as an independent game developer or were you doing engine programming as an employee in the past?

Anyway, congratulations for being a professional indie.

[Schrompf]

It's complicated :-) Have been doing Shareware from ~1995, the term "engine" wasn't even a thing back then. I did a "commercial" Amiga game 1998-2002 with publisher, team and all. Amiga was dead by then, so it wasn't a big deal, and of course it was far from break even... so one could say I was indie before indie was a term. Worked at AA PC games (Like triple A, but smaller) using a commercial engine. Started my largest endeavor Splitterwelten in 2003, a Gothic like RPG, this is probably the closest thing to "engine coder" I ever was. Always on the side, I'm C++ coder by trade since 2005. Went Freelancer in 2011, published a game on Steam in 2014, again no real engine, just some tools and a data flow resulting on nice moving pictures on screen. Started sort of real Voxel engine in 2013, which is slowly growing since then. Stopped being a freelancer in 2016 when my daughter appeared on the horizon.

Judging from the questions I got the impression that you think of an engine as a mighty harvester sort-of vehicle, which is somehow built up from the ground and designed with lots of plugables and slots and driver seats and a support team. Do you? Because for me an engine was more of a tool belt. One day you stand in front of a tree and craft a simple saw to get started. Next day you build a small cable car to your shed to move the splinters. And like this you slowly build a workflow that in the end allows people to design small wooden robots and have them wave at bystanders when they wind it up.

In that image, Unity is a hall full of conveyor belts and general purpose presses and huge machines, but you can't move any of them, you have to think about how you configure each of them so that at the end the whole hall starts cracking with a deafening noise level and spits out 10 million wooden figures per second.

[encelo]

It's complicated :-)

And also very fascinating.
Speaking about the Amiga, I was a user from 1991 to 2001 and I went all the way from an unexpanded A500 to a towerized A1200 with BlizzardPPC and BVision, playing GLQuake on the internet.

Judging from the questions I got the impression that you think of an engine as a mighty harvester sort-of vehicle, which is somehow built up from the ground and designed with lots of plugables and slots and driver seats and a support team.

It can be many things. I have worked on both small ones (with a small team supporting just a couple games) to AAA ones, but what I'm most interested in, at the moment, is making my 2D framework general enough that some crazy people will start picking it for their simple 2D games/prototypes/tools.

[Schrompf]

Oh, ok. Good luck then. An engine for general use is a completely different challenge in my books. You're not only competing on features but also on workflow, tools and - most importantly - a huge amount of docs, tutorials, issues and solutions of previous users, and so on. If you have a problem in Unity, you can google it. If you have a problem in a small free toolset, you can post in a forum and wait. It's difficult. So good luck all the more.

[raigan]

N++ was made using a custom C++/OpenGL engine.

[encelo]

N++ was made using a custom C++/OpenGL engine.

Thanks, I have just added N++ to the list.

[Action Tad]

All the games I will now start to release pretty fast, have been made with my new open source Tabageos library.
The name is old because years ago it was my library in AS3 for flash. I've updated everything for HTML5 and redone it in JavaScript. And there is an editor that will go with it that can turn placed art and simple strings into complete whole games.

The games released so far are 'Simpler Land: become a ninja', and 'Run From An Underground Drill'.