All Game Engines Suck Ass

What is a game engine anyway?

I am not going to bother with differences of Unity, Unreal, Unigine and Godot. Im sure they’re all horrible in their own ways and their differences go beyond the letter that their name starts with. So lets generalize:

• Base engine runs on C++
• C# or other scripting language to run the game logic.
• Most low level stuff is abstracted away from you.
• Workflow is centered around scenes with a hierarchy.

One could think that it is great that these difficult things such as scene managment & drawing are already solved for you. But what if you need to change any of this?
Purgatory is a very good example of that - it shows how inflexible game engines are, as it was extremly painful to make drawing work in Unity, only for it to break later on because of a 6 year old engine bug. Project hierarchy also looked like a complete mess because there was no better way to do it.

Another example: I do not want my game’s interface to look ugly. Because this is a game engine we can’t just write some code like a sane person would.
There must be a seperate scene for drawing it. It must scale properly in all display sizes. All of the UI components must be initialized in editor, not in code. It can’t use a sane coordinate system as it isn’t precise enough.

Of course you might argue that all of the game engines i mentioned provide tools to extend their functionality and are even open source but at this point why even bother with it?
Especially when the alternative of frameworks has none of that.

Frameworks

There are many frameworks. Pretty much all of them are almost exatly the same.

• At least handle resources & rendering for you. Audio at most.
• Any language you can think of.
• Weights x100 less than your installation of Unreal.
• Workflow is whatever you design it to be.

What most youtubers do not want you to know is that games are just that - rendering (and an update loop); They just want you to buy their Unreal/Unity course that will make you into a pro game developer in a matter of days. (no refunds)
So lets go over the previous examples and how things changed:

1. Setting up rendering wasn’t painful at all. In fact, it is even better than before - all because i can just draw something twice. In fact, i can improve it even further.
2. There is no special fucky-wucky canvas component. You can do UI in any way you want.
3. Expanding engine functionality is as simple as adding another library.