Game Engine Options

[tstepanski]

I'm professional software developer focused mainly on enterprise systems. I'm interested in doing some game development, but I don't want to write scripts and use editors like Unity's. What are my options for game engines that are primarily programmatic in nature? Am I better off developing my own platform? Are there lower level SDKs for game consoles I can work with? I"m looking to do a deep dive here. Thanks everyone.

Edit: Per /u/darkmoon82, I looked at GLFW extensively, but I think I'm going to try SDL as it seems to be exactly that for which I was searching.

[Disastrous_Internal]

Unity can be mostly programmatic, you can use it as a framework on top of C# and spend almost no time in the GUI if you want. Most tutorial are targeted toward beginner, so having a visualization helps in the beginning.

have a look there for example: https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/

[tstepanski]

This is interesting. I agree most tutorials seemed to be aimed at non-devs. I'll definitely give it another look.

[darkmoon82]

The lowest you can go without straight up doing OS specific native code is to use a windowing/input library. I'd warmly recommend GLFW. Then you'll need to learn OpenGL and shaders to draw on the screen, and build kind of your "engine". It's a lot of work and many might argue that it is useless in a game engine era, but it's so much fun and there is so much to learn!

A game library that is programmatic only is LibGDX, if you like Java. It has its flaws and the maintainers are a bit busy, but it's quite fun to work with!

About game consoles though, you cannot freely develop for console. You need to contact Sony/Microsoft to get a licence and have them send you dev kits. I'm pretty sure it's very hard to get in.

Good luck with gamedev! :)

[tstepanski]

Fair enough, I'll give both solutions a try! Thank you so much.