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JoeyJoJoJr | on: Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)
I’d highly recommend going with SDL if it’s 2D. IMO libraries like MonoGame, Love2D, LibGDX only offer small conveniences over SDL with big negative tradeoffs, sacrificing portability, quality of libraries, and conventions. The downsides of using C++ are now heavily mitigated with the use AI tools.

I could never jell with C++ until I had Cursor hold my hand (especially around the build system), and now I feel like I am developing games with a razor sharp knife that I could never before access. The patterns associated working directly with memory suddenly clicked and now it’s the only I want to build games.

tripledry | parent | next
Similar, I also went back to mainly C++ and Raylib now that I can delegate the "boring" stuff to AI, never had any issues with programming in C++ it was mainly adding dependencies and builds I hated (configuration).

I still don't use it (AI) for the game programming as it sucks the joy out of it for me. Especially when AI usage is currently being pushed hard at work.

raincole | parent
I'm actually building my own mini-engine with SDL_GPU. It works ok so far. I'm quite confident that it's capable enough to replicate most of Unity's URP features (except the shader graph as I don't plan to expose such an interface for artists).

But I haven't reached to the more tedious parts, like doing skeleton animation on GPU and testing cross platform (SDL should be naturally cross platform, but I never tested it...), etc. The most tedious part, imo, is to build your own 3D scene editor.

At very least I can say SDL has reached a passable state for 3D. It doesn't support some modern features like bindless though.

And one doesn't need to stich with C++ if they don't want to. SDL is pure C and if your favorite language can call foreign function it's not that hard to make it work with SDL.