All,
Edgar made a comment in another thread that 2D Engines like Allegro and SDL appear to be dying while 3D engines like Unreal and Unity are on the rise. Wave of the future I suppose. I quickly scanned the pages for Unreal and Unity. Unity mentions 2D capability while Unreal didn’t. If 3D is the next wave, it would make sense they would promote that aspect. The games / images they displayed looked like the newer console games. Again, I get they are trying to show new & improved.

My question. If Allegro and SDL type engines die out, will the only options in game programming be highly graphic FPS and games like Portal? What happens to the PacMan / Pharoah’s Tomb / Commander Keen type programming? Or will that die out as well?

What do you think?

I don’t think 2D games will die out, pixel games have had a huge resurgence in recent years, but I think people are favouring the newer tools to use them. Being able to do all of your tiles/maps/shaders in a one stop shop like Unity is seen as much more favourable rather than having to code everything from the ground up.

Well, that’s my opinion!

Each has their audience. Unreal is going for that "extreme graphics" brand, while Unity is going for more for a broader audience and not focusing so much on graphics. Both of them are companies (like any other company), and need users. Each of them are trying to knock out a part of the market.

If you want to make production-level games with Allegro, you will have to put in some work. Like Dizzy said, you'll need to build a shader pipeline, add loader code for models, create animation and rigging systems, and consider the ramifications of cross-platform quirks.

Allegro does provide a good foundation for you to do these things, specifically in cross-platform support. The alternative is that you use the OS's APIs directly, but who wants to do that when Allegro already has such a nice abstraction API. So Allegro has a place.

If you want to make games, you'll need to have tools like level editors, 3D modeling software, pixel art tools, etc. These things are not provided by Allegro, but other game development tools do include things with this purpose. The typical path that Allegro users have taken is to spend time building out their own level editors. Realistically, this might not be the best use of development time.

I personally prefer to build out my own workflows, so I love things like Allegro.
Any other tool that provides APIs or has scripting support (Tiled, Blender, FLStudio, etc) is just incredibly powerful (did you know you can run Blender headless?

Ok now I get it. I'm not that hardcore of a programmer. I'm more leisurely. My games don't involve shaders or mapping. So I'm not sure Unity or Unreal would offer me anything that I'm not getting with Allegro. , I'm just now starting to include a mouse.

Thanks for the insight. I was wondering what the difference was and why one would work where the other didn't. I'm not an expert now but have the jest of how they work.

2D may well die due to the lack of programmers who know how to take advantage of the charm of these types of games, but I don't think that will ever happen, because if you really care about games you will run into 2D games, like all the old game consoles with their ROMs.
And they will realize that 2D games are better than 3D because they invoke the imagination better. When you make a 3D game, you always look for realism, and that takes away from the novelty of a game.

There is some truth to that. Old 3D games tend to look just clumsy today, at least compared to beautifully crafted pixel art which has become an art style in itself.

A really good channel I follow is Best Indie Games. The channel showcases new indie games all the time and puts out a video at least twice a week showcasing the flood of indie games that are going into the market.

There's a LOT of pixel art.

Here's a dang video:

I don't know where you guys are sourcing your despair from? 2D games and 2D pixel art are doing fine. 🤷‍♂️

Here are some pics of newer metroidvania games:

https://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/613328
https://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/613329
https://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/613330
https://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/613331
https://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/613332

2d games will never go anywhere, just like boardgames will never die.

But you don't have to practically have a degree in programming to write 2D games anymore. An engine + scriptkiddies is sufficient now to get things on the screen.

I'll just say this, when was the latest AAA 2D game? Starcraft II?

SC2 is 3D, you can change the viewing angle

Prove my point even harder baby.

So it was Starcraft I I was thinking of.

As I stated in the other thread, 2D isn't dying. The problem is we live in a world that wants everything faster so 2D games are now made in engines like Unity and Godot instead of being fully done with libraries where you have to do all the setup and background coding. Which, while I no longer consider myself a programmer nor game dev, is sad cause I always found beauty in the code. I know the ease of it as I remember the pong clone I made in 2005 compared to following the Learn Unity site and making infinite runner where I just drag and drop the assets, attach C# scripts and have a game in a matter of minutes.

Then there is also the surge of YouTube videos showing how easy it is to make games with Unity and Chat GPT. I have my concerns over these kinds of videos, I don't feel that they nurture learning programming.

I mean, using ChatGPT to code is not exactly easy. You still have to know what you're doing, it gets things wrong all the time, and often misses edge cases that you have to be an experienced programmer to look out for. Those YouTube videos are mostly clickbait that you shouldn't feign over. They're up there with "Learn to code C++ in 48 hours!".

You're right Mark, my concerns are just amped over all the news I've been seeing about the writer and actor strikes, Congress, indie devs, programmers, and non-programmers, just a lot of bombardment , but I guess I should be grateful they've not done any Skynet or Legion segments yet.

Sounds like 2D is here for a while. I can appreciate that.

I’m not sure where I fall yet on the “drag and drop” programming Vs detailed coding. On the one hand I learned going from Quick Basic to C, with options comes complexity. On the flipside, as with learning a musical instrument, often the mastery of the instrument impedes self-expression / creativity in the use of the instrument.

One thing I do find discouraging. Writing a simplistic looking game, such as a match game or a simon says game where you work on the logic and error proofing for weeks. You stand back all proud and pumped. You show someone used to playing 3D graphical, console type games and they look at you like ...nice..... So disheartening. You're like, "You don't understand, I had to prevented this situation, while allowing the player to use this option..." as their eyes glaze over.

What is disheartening, also, is when you see the admin of a gamedev discord server that promotes all things gamedev in another discord server for gamedev bashing all 2D games and pixel art as a "blight on the industry that needs to die".

Well, as a consumer, you never think about the many people and m/billions of $$$ required to create a product to today's standards. Maybe AI will level the playing field a bit as everyone can use it to regurgitate the work of others without paying them.

Yeah Polybios. I get that a one man (novice) show isn't going to compete with modern day big budget productions. Still when you do something you find impressive given your skill set, it’s frustrating not to have someone to share it with. I once did a simon says clone. The game itself was typical, but I managed to create an LED looking score screen with a ticker tape affect. I was please anyway given my limitations. But you show it to someone used to playing Skyrim and they look at it like, whatever. You can’t even be proud in front of other coders. Their always like “ you shouldn’t have used those 60 lines of code. You should have used the al_LED(x,y,size,*keycode) command to prevent a memory leaks.”

What does AAA have to do with anything? AAA can only make mass-market appeal [bland] games.

That's why indie has exploded. If you haven't noticed indie games taking over, you haven't been playing games.

Factorio [which initially ran on Allegro5]
Oxygen Not Included
Undertale
Prison Architect
Age of Empires II: HD gets a new DLC every 3 months
Brigador is beautiful and runs on a 2D engine + shaders + bump mapping
Vampire Survivors
Southpark: Stick of Truth [<--*Made by a AAA studio*]

Each of those above sold millions and that's just a few off the top of my head in my Steam library right now.

Honorable Mentions:

- Ion Fury is literally running on the Duke Nukem 3D engine. Made millions.
- Dwarf Fortress is literally text and can run over SSH. Made millions.

There's a brand new unnamed Fallout 1/2 game in 2D coming out to massive fanfair.
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Itch.io is full of thousands of 2D games.