Forward

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

-- Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park)

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

-- Dante (Inferno)

You ever just wake up one day and think "fuck it, I'm capable of doing whatever I want, I'm going to build my own game engine"? No, just me? Well, one day I woke up and decided I wanted to build my own game engine with no prior knowledge of how to build a game engine, and this project is the result of that impulse.

In truth, I've always been interested in building my own games. I remember spending my free time in middle school modding Cube 2: Sauerbraten and thinking I was the shit, hell I even almost enrolled in a game design college after high school (shoutout my cousin Ryan for convincing me to not move forward with that one, my life is a lot better than it would've been), but I ultimately found myself in the world of full stack web development. Don't get me wrong, I love my day job, and I'm genuinely very good at what I do, but my true passion has always been in games.

Around May 2024 I decided to finally start making my own game. I did tons of research on tooling, and decided to run with Unreal Engine. Call it a skill issue, but I couldn't get much further than implementing character movement. Unreal Engine is undeniably a great tool, but my tiny web developer brain just couldn't wrap its head around the engine's documentation and tutorials. After one particularly painful night of banging my head against the wall trying to understand the engine's builtin ability system I had finally had enough. I popped a 10mg edible, went to bed (early and defeated), and woke up the next day determined to build something better than Unreal. It was at that point that Epic Games was my mortal enemy, and I started researching.

Now realistically I know I'll never get to the point of Unreal Engine feature parity (at least not by myself and not for a very long time), and that's totally okay. This engine is an amazing learning process for me, and I can't wait to one day build my very own game with it and (hopefully) watch others do the same. Thanks for reading all of this, thanks for checking out Manatee, and I sincerely hope you enjoy building some amazing fucking games.

-- James Kienle