Game Engine Questions Thread

Hi,

In my studies as engineer I've had the chance to get a shot at making a little game on android, completely in raw java .
Currently I'm making a little rogue-legacy like platform game with a bunch of other students. I've really got into it and i'm thinking about doing more of this in the future and maybe work in this sector.
We've been able to make really good results but i feel like in some domains we start to get limited. For instance, I was trying to optimize my particle collision effects and all I found on the internet were mainly descriptions by people using all made game engines such as gamemaker, unity3D, mmf2, ... With some research i've found that almost every game, especially indie ones, are most of the times made from these engines by people who only know to code via a program who almost gives them a "what you see is what you get" interface. It feels like even the big compagnies like valve only work via game engines.
So my question is: if i wanna start a little project of my own and have good looking results and physics, am i forced to buy a 1500$ unity3D license ? Do some videogame compagnies work without gameengines ?

I mean, it's quiet saddening to see that if i want to have good particle collision effects in my game, all i find on google are people redirecting me to game engines. I tend to be discouraged and follow their advices when i see that my android game laggs with more than 50 particles checking their collisions on screen, even with quadtrees, and that game like Broforce made in unity3d run perfectly smooth with particles and shit all over the screen.

Thanks for your time,

Suladan

I'm pretty sure what you're looking for is called 'Vertex Array Objects'

Alot of the big companies either build there own in house engine to run off or make minor changes to prebuilt ones. Mainly because you dont need to re-invent them. Although it is perfectly logical to make smaller projects in pure code, then over time develop that into an engine should you need it. And I recommend you render particles GPU side mainly because its alot faster