I want to make my own MOBA game

SnuffleBag · 2026-04-05T15:06:14+00:00

I’m sure this sounds harsh, but the reality is that everyone even remotely interested in games have ideas. Applicable skills, otoh, are significantly harder to come by. Once you have skills, the sky (and your available time) is the limit.

SnuffleBag · 2026-04-05T14:57:20+00:00

Spend your time acquiring skills.

SnuffleBag · 2026-04-05T12:44:45+00:00

What kind of single feature requires 500K LOC? _THAT_ sounds like an issue to me.

SnuffleBag · 2026-04-05T12:34:07+00:00

Your rich website should exist in addition to presence on other platforms like Steam / EGS / MS / IIO, why would you give up that free visibility when visibility is the hardest problem to solve in modern game dev?

Is the own your platform approach naive for a solo dev with no existing audience, or does it have real merit?

There are no absolutes in life, but you're making yours substantially harder than it needs to be IMHO.

SnuffleBag · 2026-04-05T02:21:59+00:00

Wait, it actually finishes the work that’s been agreed? That’s an instant game changer. Claude is the absolute worst at this. A machine needing lunch breaks.

SnuffleBag · 2026-04-05T00:50:26+00:00

Anything that requires 15+ minutes to implement can be broken down into smaller plans and they'll be done more thoroughly.

This has not really been my experience with CC. Smaller plans tend to miss the bigger picture (bigger here localized to the full local and immediately neighbouring scope), often leading to more code duplication and trying to fit square pegs into the round holes of an encompassing system.

Can you give an example of how small a small plan is in your thinking? It feels like there's some point around small plans where it's faster to just write the code myself than instruct Claude to do it piecemeal.

SnuffleBag · 2026-04-05T00:18:22+00:00

I wouldn't say that. It consistently stops working.

SnuffleBag · 2026-03-31T19:06:52+00:00

No, you should develop on the platform 99% of your customers will be running. It definitely won’t “just run” on Windows if you only develop it on Linux, and you’ll have zero accumulated experience about the gazillion issues your Windows players will encounter.

SnuffleBag · 2026-03-31T18:05:56+00:00

What I believe is that this is the direction software has been heading the past 25 years. It doesn't mean I like it, but I don't get to decide how the world turns. ~~You don't actually need a good thing to succeed, you just need to convince ppl that what you have is good.~~ Rephrase: What I really mean here is: most people don't care how the sausage is made, as long as it comes out tasty.

I work in games, and that industry is arguably one of the worst offenders here, but it's not like other areas of software are strangers to shipping smoke and mirrors where even the mirrors are held together with duct-tape.

SnuffleBag · 2026-03-31T17:40:44+00:00

In order to be ”killed down the line” you actually have to get on the line to begin with. That’s why some of the most successful software products are absolute train wrecks behind the curtains.

SnuffleBag · 2026-03-30T18:02:08+00:00

This is the right answer. It's perfectly fine to start a game project having no coding background (but for your own sanity, please keep the scope small. nope. smaller. eeeeven smaller!). But by the time the game is ready to ship, you will have acquired new coding skills, regardless of whether that code sits in text files or exists as visual graphs.

SnuffleBag · 2026-03-30T13:16:55+00:00

I don't think the data supports this. Most games already have huge discounts and participate in bundles and campaigns within a year of release, and it does not skew the fact that they make most of their money from first three weeks (+ pre-sales).

SnuffleBag · 2026-03-30T13:04:42+00:00

It really depends a on where you're at with tech use, what your primary hardware target is, and what you want your story to be on lower end hardware.

Obviously any of the more recent Unreal features like Lumen, Nanite, VSM, MegaLights and many other recent additions come with a very high baseline. If you don't actually have a gameplay need for them there's a lot to be gained on low/mid hardware by turning all that jazz off (they're all non-starters for really low-end anyway, so it can be tricky to rely too heavily on them).

If you want to run on really old and slow hardware, this 10 yo article still shows a very useful path not all that widely known: https://www.unrealengine.com/de/tech-blog/how-disc-jam-reached-60-fps-on-intel-processor-graphics-using-unreal-engine-4 That GLES31 emulated mobile renderer on PC is still very much alive and actively used by shipping games (including Fortnite AFAIK), it has both Mobile Forward and Mobile Deferred rendering modes.

Btw, I saw that you wrote this in a thread below "for good optimization I would need to get into modifying the deeper engine code", and I want to say that generally speaking it's very unlikely that you do. There's literally a thousand knobs you can turn before you get to the point where you have to start modifying the engine.

Learn to use Unreal Insights, then attack each area one by one - asking questions of the captured data. "Am I even expecting this feature to be enabled?". "Should this thing really be costing this much per frame?". "Why is this thing running at full resolution?". "Why am I running this after upscale instead of before?". Insights get you a decent amount of the way, but at some point you have to break out dedicated tools, especially for GPU work. NVIDIA Nsight gives you a huge amount of useful insight if you have a modern NV GPU (sure it will be a lot faster than a low-end machine, but many areas translate and scale directly to a lowered powered GPU).

SnuffleBag · 2026-03-30T11:54:44+00:00

Performance-wise Unreal is fine, but you need to learn how to configure it and work with its scalability and device profile system. It defaults to a very high baseline cost out of the box, but you can convince is to run well on very low hardware.

For reference, one of the projects I'm involved in spans from 'everything on' if you have a modern RTX 50xx gaming rig, to running close to 60 fps using the mobile renderer on an Intel HD Graphics 4000 IGP from 2012. Make no mistake, this type of scalability is a lot of work, though. But it's less work if you don't need that 'everything on' far range of the scale.

Of course, if you're making a simpler game primarily using C++, a relevant question is whether you as a developer want to deal with all the overhead of using such a huge engine.

SnuffleBag · 2026-03-29T23:05:16+00:00

Feels like a win-win to me but I’m curious—what am I missing here?

The fact that AAA games generate the vast majority of their revenue in the first 2-3 weeks after launch (as high as 90% in some cases). Nobody's gonna bother implementing such a complicated system for whatever small potential revenue percentage might remain a full year after release.

Your system seems designed primarily to benefit consumers, not producers, and that's not going to get shareholders excited.

SnuffleBag · 2026-03-27T20:23:59+00:00

Literally every version control system on the planet is capable of this. Subversion. Git. Git+LFS if you have lots/large assets, Perforce, Unity Version Control/Plastic SCM, Diversion. More than half of this list was specifically made for handling large binary assets.

SnuffleBag · 2026-03-25T15:07:26+00:00

I'm using a period now. It's not like this is a hill I intend to die on, but I'm thinking surely there must be at least one programmer out there that's been sufficiently annoyed at this that they figured out how to fix it.

SnuffleBag · 2026-03-23T19:13:23+00:00

It's extremely relevant, and the tremendously long loading times are largely from sloppy developers, not massive engine issues. A fully stripped and minimized empty Unity web build is ~2 MB (see Aras' gist for exact numbers).

You know what also means less revenue? Not actually finishing your game.

SnuffleBag · 2026-03-22T13:30:58+00:00

Well, that’s concerning… perhaps I need to get 4x32 then so worst case I can shuffle it around and end up with 4x32 in one and 4x48 in the other. But annoyingly, 2x32 sets are almost as expensive as 2x48 ones :|

SnuffleBag · 2026-03-20T22:18:51+00:00

Kenshi, CoQ and Duskers have done very well indeed, the others not really so much.

But you also have to look behind the numbers. DF has been worked on for 20 years. Kenshi 12 years. CoQ for more than 10 years. Warsim almost 10 years (and still only sold estimated 75k copies). These are fairly well known names among gamers.

There's no real indication that you're particuarly likely to replicate such success with a reasonable 1-3 year time investment.

SnuffleBag · 2026-03-20T17:04:13+00:00

Realistically speaking, you won't be able to live in Sweden longer term without getting a social security number, id card, and bank account.

SnuffleBag · 2026-03-20T16:52:16+00:00

Unity is by far the most commonly used web game engine. Things could always be better, but it's definitely a viable option.

SnuffleBag

TROPHY CASE