One of the biggest roadblocks I have encounter while trying to learn game development is dealing with an engine. My background is in iOS development and Xcode is sort of a happy medium between an IDE and an engine.

I didn’t quite understand a lot of how all the pieces worked together and talking to people whose only context about development was from games didn’t help much because people just didn’t have a mental picture of doing things any differently.

So, after several years of exploring various engines, my decision at this point is that I don’t want to use any of them.

Here are my reasons for not wanting to use the ones I am most familiar with:

• Unity: Oh god, where to begin. I started with Unity and tried to learn it over the course of several years and I just don’t like it. I don’t like the user interface. I don’t like the gray box level builder. I don’t like their code frameworks. I don’t like C#. I additionally do not like that they keep adding multiple ways to accomplish something and then stop supporting them, leaving developers to hope they picked the right way and it will keep working moving forward. I talked to a bunch of indies who have used Unity for a decade and none of them thought any of this stuff was an issue. It was simply the way things are and you get used to them. I didn’t want to get used to it and wanted to find a better way.
• Game Maker Studio: I want to start with 2D because my art skills are not great yet, so GMS was an option. It seems somewhat easy to learn and use, but it utilizes a proprietary scripting language and it charges you money for its use. Neither of these is ideal. Also, one reason I was interested in GMS was because I read Spelunky was created in it. After reading Derek Yu’s book about Spelunky, I found that he prototyped it in GMS and then actually built the version I play with in a custom engine. So this doesn’t seem like a good long term option.
• Unreal: I will be honest, of all the engines I tried, Unreal was my favorite. I liked the frameworks. The shader builder was slick. The interface was nice to use. It actually works because the people who built it use it to ship games and things don’t just fall into ruin. It also open sourced its code so you can look at how things work and put in fixes if necessary. My only real issue with Unreal was that it is designed around larger teams doing 3D shooter games. A lot of the code is abstracted away to facilitate teams with a bunch of non-coders. In order to set up a 2D game I would have to position all the elements in 3D space and set up a camera. I really don’t want to do that. I loved learning Unreal while I was working with code, but once I had to work with the gray box environment, my brain would just black out. I’m sure there are ways around using the gray box, but I am too frustrated to deal with them right now, so I am considering revisiting Unreal once I have more experience building things.
• Godot: I was under the impression that I had to use a language I do not know for this, so I didn’t seriously explore it. I will revisit in a few years as it seems to be changing and advancing quite rapidly.

While I was trying to learn Unreal, I realized I don’t feel comfortable with C++ code and syntax, so I decided to actually take a deep dive into the language. Everyone was warning me away from it because “It’s terrible!” But I didn’t actually find it to be so. I know the warnings are from people trying to debug code other people wrote that is in production and so forth, but I found the actual language to be well designed and similar to languages I already know and like. I am sure I will grow to hate it as others do, but for today I have found it surprisingly pleasant to work with.

I worked through a book on C++ game development that used the Simple Fast Media Library (SFML) to place sprites and do rendering. This library also felt very intuitive to work with. I found working with this language and this library to be the most intuitive way for me to work on games. So this is the combination I will utilize for at least the next year.

SFML also has a template that can be applied to Xcode to allow me to use Xcode for SFML development. I spoke with one of the maintainers on Twitter who indicated that I can build code I wrote in SFML to desktop and mobile devices. At this point I don’t need to ship to a console, so this is sufficient for my needs.

I don’t know if this counts as building my own engine or not. I’m trying to avoid touching low level rendering as that is a rabbit hole. SFML wraps OpenGL so I don’t have to get that working to build games, so there is just the right amount of abstraction for me right now.

A lot of the past couple of years has been me trying to force myself to learn stuff that doesn’t go with how my brain works. I logically understand that using an engine gets you a lot of advantages. But most of the big ones are not designed for people like me. For better or worse, I think in code. I have never been good at thinking about things in 3D spaces and I really do not like how the engines are designed around building visuals in these spaces and attaching scripts to them. I understand if you are building Fortnite that this functionality is vital, but it’s not if you’re building Candy Crush.

When you are learning a new skill, it can be overwhelming because there are fifty things you don’t understand. Knowledge comes from slowly learning bits and pieces of these things and winnowing them down until you don’t understand a third of them. Then you stop noticing the things you didn’t know before and can focus on the few things you still need to understand.

My hope is to spent the rest of this year and all of next year building small games. I would like to “ship” them by uploading them to something like Itch.io and selling them for a buck. I hope that after I have done this three or so times, I can come back to something like Unreal and feel more comfortable with the interface as I won’t have to learn the language and how to build a game.

If you are struggling to learn something you really want to understand, it’s okay to think about why you are struggling. Is it the tools? At what point do you just give up on something even though you don’t want to? Is there a way around the thing you don’t want to do? Not everyone thinks the same way and it is totally okay to pursuit a different direction if what you are currently doing isn’t working.