You Don't Need a Game Engine

Reaching for a game engine first is a habit, not a rule. If your game and its visual style are a fit, writing the code yourself gives you something an engine cannot: every pixel is your decision. This channel is the proof. Its falling-sand world runs live 24 hours a day as one Rust program with no game engine and no GPU: about 18,000 lines of Rust, a 2 MB binary, and less than half of one CPU core on a laptop, with the frames piped into ffmpeg. The video takes one frame of a tiny game (400 lines of Rust, no libraries) and gives it a look one decision at a time: flat colours, a palette, shading, glow, a bitmap font, crisp integer-scaled pixels, and a rule no engine has a checkbox for: nothing on screen may strobe. Each one is a few lines you can read. Then the honest parts: what an engine really is (a list of jobs), what it costs to write the loop yourself (a real fixed-timestep loop, and no editor), games that shipped on their own engines (Noita, Factorio, Animal Well), and when you should use an engine after all: 3D, console ports, a team that needs an editor, physics-heavy or content-heavy games, or a known genre on a deadline. Libraries such as SDL and raylib are the middle ground. The channel runs a falling-sand world live 24/7:    / @alchemicalabyss   Chapters 0:00 No game engine, no GPU 0:24 The whole program, counted 0:52 One frame gets its look 1:17 Colour: flat, palette, shading 1:38 Glow in three steps 1:50 A 3x5 font and crisp pixels 2:06 A rule: nothing may strobe 2:31 What an engine is: a list of jobs 2:55 The price: you write the loop 3:18 Noita, Factorio, Animal Well 3:48 When you do want an engine 4:11 The rule of thumb #gamedev #rust #programming