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Comment by promiseofbeans | Hacker News Reader

One of the smartest devs I know built his game from scratch in C. Pretty complex game too - 3D open-world management game. It's now successful on steam.

Thing is, he didn't make the game in C. He built his game engine in C, and the game itself in Lua. The game engine is specific to this game, but there's a very clear separation where the engine ends and the game starts. This has also enabled amazing modding capabilities, since mods can do everything the game itself can do. Yes they need to use an embedded scripting language, but the whole game is built with that embedded scripting language so it has APIs to do anything you need.

For those who are curious - the game is 'Sapiens' on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1060230/Sapiens/

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I agree that the game is amazing from a technical point of view, but look at the reviews and the pace of development. The updates are sparse and slow, and if there's an update, it's barely an improvement. This is one the of disadvantages of creating a game engine from scratch: more time is spent on the engine than the game itself, which may or may not be bad depending on which perspective you look at it from.

The cause could be an art bottleneck and less to do with the game's code.

Maybe, it's using lowpoly models though which are relatively easier to create or outsource. This game is more on simulations and procedural generation, so I think game code is the likely the bottleneck.

This confused me as well. The scripting / engine divide is old and long standing.

Do you know why he supports MacOS, but not Linux?

Most likely because they don't use Linux. Or because it's kind of a mine field to support with bugs that occur on different distros. Even Unity has their own struggles with Linux support.

They're distributing their game on Steam too so Linux support is next to free via Proton.

> it's kind of a mine field to support with bugs that occur on different distros

Non-issue. Pick a single blessed distro. Clearly state that it's the only configuration that you officially support. Let the community sort the rest out.

This is a terrible solution, you're better off just making it Windows only and ensuring it can be run via Proton/Wine.

Why is it terrible? It gives a concrete target that the build is tested on. If someone cares they can most likely create an environment on their system that matches it. I don't see how that's any different from providing (for example) a flatpak.

It probably supports Linux via proton. Done. Official valve recommendation a few years ago not sure if still active.

Wine works really well on linux but not on macos.

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