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Comment by dazzawazza | Hacker News Reader

This is seriously cool but I really think we are losing our way in game development.

We used to create DSLs to make scripting of games simpler and less error prone... so that coders/designers could write Scripts/AI in a language better suited to the problems they face. It was sort of a side issue that is was a sandbox although that was really useful for lots of reasons.

Now we seem to be creating more and more complex toolchains while complaining that game development is getting more and more expensive. We're not solving the correct problems at all.

Oh well.

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Modern AAA game development is suffering a chronic mismanagement problem. Like fimmaking. Poor creative vision, not communicated clearly to those executing it; endless rewrites and rework; lack of originality; poor treatment of staff leading to poor morale; and churning away in the background, the culture war.

Technically the only interesting challenge is "how do we get off Unity?"

> a chronic mismanagement problem. Like fimmaking.

the mismanagement stems from the fact that it is costing too much from the onset, and "management" wants to ensure that the investment makes a good enough return to justify the high cost.

Therefore, they dictate all of the risks have to be removed - such as not going for a risky new brand, but make a sequel. They want realistic graphics because it's more commercially viable - going for a different or uncommon aesthetic means taking risks.

I would argue all of the problems in AAA development stems from this fact.

it is also why indie games can be so cheap yet so successful. Not because indies are better (tho they are- at least more passionate if nothing else), but because indies are capable of taking risks to push the edge and make something new and untested.

It's the same as films - creative endeavours cannot have their risks managed away. It is inherent, and there's a large chance of failure even if the team has done their best.

The risk aversion in product is not a new phenomenon, though. Bigger producers have been following that track since at least the 90s. Adherence to brand, and even more so to basic game genres and mechanics, has been an issue complained about by devs at any big enough studio for decades.

What changed, I think, is all of the development studios being bought up by large producers. But, then again, I see steam as being a great counterforce on this, and the ease of releasing on web or mobile has been a boon for indie devs too. So maybe that hasn't changed that much.

The technology has advanced to where you can spend blockbuster budgets and get nearly film-quality results (not nearly possible in the cartridge and CD days). Meanwhile the price per AAA title has stayed relatively fixed at 50-60 USD for that same range of time, so production houses have had to try being appealing to ever-larger audiences. Fortunately, many people continue playing these games into their 30s and 40s so the market grows on its own too.

I'm trying to say you're right about the risk aversion being a big part of the industry's problems but that's been an issue for a while, it has gotten terribly enhanced with the growth of the industry.

Now I wonder which is worse.. extracting money one quarter a time with punishingly difficult timing tests, or extracting money via cosmetics that have no actual game impact but are marketed very compellingly.

>it is also why indie games can be so cheap yet so successful. Not because indies are better (tho they are- at least more passionate if nothing else), but because indies are capable of taking risks to push the edge and make something new and untested.

The cheapness also means indies simply get more "shots on goal." The barrier to entry is relatively low, so failing is lower-stakes. You have way more indies trying (and mostly failing), which means you have a greater raw number of hits. That's compared to a big company only having a handful of big-budget games in development.

This also creates a better environment for learning the craft. You learn more about how to create good games by launching 3 small indie games in 3 years than 1 large game. Especially when you’re a small cog in that large game project.

This certainly seems to be true, at least for one modern example, according to a recent post that linked to a YouTube video whose creator evidently has insider information about the 'failure' of Kerbal Space Program 2 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40485788).

As someone in an otherwise healthy position at my job, fuck yes, I want to get away from Unity, but there's just no better option for the platforms we're targeting and how quickly we want to ship things. Something about the devil you know, ya know?

What are your thoughts on Godot? If you were equally experienced and invested in that would things be different?

As someone who's worked quite a bit with both, no. I have hopes for Godot but in terms of actually shipping commercially-viable games, it's not even in the same league as Unity. This comes from many things, but some of the big ones are:

* Ability to do first-party console ports

* 3D rendering fidelity and speed

* Asset store quality & quantity

* Robustness & stability - they both have tons of bugs but with Unity there is almost always a way around the bug, due to the decades of commercial games that paved the path before you.

For one quick example, Godot's physics engine is well-known to be poor, both in terms of performance and in terms of accuracy/stability. It has tons of bugs, tunneling, jittering, etc. Both the 2D and 3D physics engines in Godot are currently slated to be ripped out & replaced with external ones of higher quality (Box2D and Jolt). But currently, that hasn't happened, so one of the foundational parts of most games - physics - is guaranteed to be broken to some degree in a Godot game.

But Jolt is pretty much a drop-in replacement right now, no?

For a hack, sure. For something you're doing seriously, not so much.

Replacing the 3d engine with Jolt is on the official roadmap. If it were really a drop in replacement today, that would have already shipped.

I adore Godot and have been learning it on my own time, but it's just not there for XR stuff yet, our current project has the Vision Pro as a target, for instance, and Unity is really the only option there. Apple's native tools (Reality Composer Pro) are just abysmal.

But yes, all of my personal projects are in Godot now, and I'm planning to use it for some tooling at work, just because it's UI system is nicer than Unity's as well as it having better support for re-using editor UI components in an application.

Getting off Unity, or Unreal, is the same as asking "how do we get off Office?".

Before their ascension there were already plenty to middleware to chose from, Ogre3D, SFML, SDL, Gamemaker, RenderWare, jMonkeyEngine,...

They aren't used as much, even the free ones, because of supported languages, tooling, asset store, platform owners support, and everything else that keeps them relevant in the industry despite their flaws.

Something I want is a sandboxed place to run USER scripts in game. I trust the game's creators to not hack my machine with their DSL (else I wouldn't be running their game). I don't trust random drive by game mod to the same level. I'd love not to have to trust user additions, but currently I do have to trust them or go without.

I run a few games that takes C# plugins. The games have a big warning that they aren't doing anything to prevent my machine getting hacked, personal files uploaded to random servers, etc....

You want luau - https://luau-lang.org/

It’s what Roblox uses

Or lua itself

Lua is a great language for embedding - the difference between lua and luau is that luau gives you a restricted sandbox for your scripts, meaning you can have user generated scripts - like Roblox, UEFN, that sort of thing

I think wasm would work pretty well given that sandboxing is essential for browser security. However, the hard part is having a functional permissions system that isn’t so strict that actually malicious plugins can slip through due to every plugin needing a ton of permissions for basic functionality.

Even if it's c++ to c++, the goal of scripting at the end of the day is quick iteration. What is "quick iteration" for scripting will depend on the scriptor.

This article is clearly targeted at engineers rolling their own engine, so that audience may find it beneficial keep everything in one language if they are already comfortable with it. As long as the core engine doesn't need to re-compile every little change, it's a win.

Yeah, I can confirm that the iteration speed is fast. I consider the scripting portion a solved problem right now, having used it so long. Gamedev is so many other things though, and practically every corner of the engine has to have convenience functionality in order to reduce the overall workload. It's rough for gamedevs right now, I feel like.

IMO the big tools are convinent enough to use. But the rampup time to really understand how the engine ticks is dreadful, because documentation drops off a cliff once you want to do more than animate a few dozen actors in a level (and tbf, sometimes that is indeed enough to ship).

The other half of the problem is asset production time. But no game engine is really solving that problem. As you'll discover in that domain, the art community is a lot more protective of their techniques and pipelines than programming. Even more so if looking for game ready asset production. Same issue, different cause.

There is one benefit to jumping through these hoops to use C++ as a scripting language (how much of a benefit it is, well, that's your judgment): you get to reuse libraries, as the author notes.

Shameless plug, but some time ago I've created a language where the main design goal was for it to be easy to use and embed: https://github.com/kgabis/ape.

AAA game development has become more expensive because production values are incredibly high and there's a shitton of content. Compare a modern AAA game to a high quality game from the SNES era, it's obvious that the AAA game just has a shitton more stuff (though that doesn't necessarily mean it's a better game obviously).

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