this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
111 points (96.6% liked)
Programming
23348 readers
291 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A homebrew game, of course! Well, more like a game engine demo. Making game engines is more fun than making games.
I'm not sure why you find it so hard to believe, as it's pretty straight-forward to build a game on top of APIs like
Then implement them differently on each target platform.
You mean embedded binary data? That's still serialization, except you're using the compiler as your serializer. Modern serialization frameworks usually have a DSL that mimics C struct declarations, and it's not a coincidence. Look up any zero-copy serialization tool and you'll find that they're all basically trying to accomplish the same thing: load a binary blob directly into a native C struct, but do it portably (which embedded binary data is not)
Nah, that's what
int32_tis for. The people who built the toolchain did that for me.Yeah that's how we did it, loading a "blob" into packed structs :-)
I'm with you with the int32_t, that's totally the way to go IMO, I guess my rant about #define INT32 got lost somewhere :-)
Actually got myself a job coding DS&Wii back in the day with my DS streaming tile engine (it is funnier to make engines), "use 64k tiles with the native 256 tile engine". I had a little demo where you wandered around and slayed skeletons Diablo 2 like, backpack and items included. Built with the unofficial retroengineered dev kit. Got my hands on the official docs after that!
Fun times.
Damn that's sick. Landing a real job from homebrew work is the coolest backstory for a game developer. I've got a couple of hb projects I'm proud of, but in the world of Unity and Unreal I don't see it as being a particularly in-demand skill set.
...not that I'd want to work for a game dev company in 2025 lol
I did have a couple of years of gamedev under the belt, but only j2me java mobile games, so laying my hands on a nintendo dev kit was one of those one in a lifetime highs for me. Still get a tingle when I think about it ☺️.
You're right about todays landscape though 😑, between abusing A to AAA companies, dark patterns and microtransactions 🤢. Such a shame. I should get into indie games more but they all feel like they were made for unity/UE, so they all feel a bit the same (where are syrategy games, spinoffs off Worms, lemmings, ...). But maybe I'm missing out, there is so much rubbish to sift through.
Cheers!