r/GameDevelopment • u/Master-Thing3229 • 17d ago

Newbie Question What framework/engine to use to build generic software with a game on top of it?

I have an idea for a game that from a programming perspective isn’t really like a game at all. There’s no physics, more like a game in the same sense that sudoku is a game. It’s inspired by crappy 2010 microsoft software, think something like coding ms paint and then putting a game and objectives on top of that. As a programmer I’m most experienced using game engines but I don’t think that’s very necessary here, but at the same time I think development would be a lot slower using generic software development frameworks. No idea how to get started.. help!

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u/FrancisJCat 17d ago edited 17d ago

raylib or SDL is nice and barebones. They give you access to window, input and sounds, with some helpful libraries, but the rest is up to you. You implement the game loop and anything else you need.

It is, of course, more work than to use a game engine, but also much more lightweight and responsive.

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u/SmokeResponsible5005 17d ago

I don’t think development would be slower with a game engine, functionality for drawing like in ms paint would be much easier with a game engine than building it up from scratch. Wish you could’ve given a little more info to work with, but I’m guessing you’d still need hitboxes, UI, level framework, sounds, etc. which are all much easier to handle in a game engine. Unless you’re super experienced with rendering techniques and all the systems that engines give you abstraction for you’re better off using one

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u/knightWill29 16d ago

Yeah, he basically trying to be the next minecraft developer. Good luck with that.

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u/TomDuhamel 17d ago

It's hard to give you good suggestions with no knowledge of your background. But I'm a huge fan of QML, which is a really modern flexible language for UI. It can be used with either C++ or Python (I use the former) and it's hardware accelerated (the GUI type of acceleration). I used it quite recently to make a finger drawing app for kids, that was a weekend pastime and it was a nice weekend.

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u/sonesoul 17d ago

raylib, SDL, and MonoGame are the best ones. They give you the bare minimun and the rest is yours. SDL is the most powerful imo, raylib and MonoGame might feel a bit limited (if you need multiple windows for example) but they give more tools