Why I use C and C++ for writing games

In the past, I have made some games in Godot and other game engines. While they worked well and I had a decent experience, for me they have a few problems.

I believe that for my area of interest (that is relatively simple 2D games), game engines are overkill and a lot of the time spent with them is devoted to working around the existing implementations of features like collisions, sprites or others. They also tend to coerce you into working with the high-level toolsets they provide, which despite usually being reliable can be tedious. With these tools, it's easy to misclick and spend the next 20 minutes wondering what you did. Yes, Godot does use text-based scene and resource definition files, but they aren't exactly the most readable. At that point I would be better off writing a source code file, or even JSON/any other similar format. Engines also tend to produce quite big binaries, while I never touch many of the included features.

Due to these issues, I began to look for other options. My first choice was MonoGame, since I was using C# at the time. However, I did not like the dependency on the MGCB editor and it was also broken on macOS at the time, with the development versions that fixed it not working entirely. So I did not settle on it and kept using Godot for a little more time.

Sometime later, I have started learning C because of my growing interest in lower-level programming. After some long consideration between using SDL or Raylib for graphics, I chose the second option.

I favor C as an option for game development for a few reasons. It provides high performance (no JIT, GC or interpreter). There is direct support for many popular game libraries like SDL, GLFW, Box2D, ENet and others without using bindings. You can compile C for essentially any platform, so porting is feasible if needed. Also, most importantly, working on a lower level is more engaging in general. It really encourages you to think about what you do.

I also like C++ for some of its convenience features, especially the containers and strings, so I sometimes use it as well. Initially I was discouraged from C++ after seeing criticism of it like this or this, but I tried it anyway and did not end up sharing those views. Maybe it's because my own usage of C++ is detached from real-world applications and I compile C++ with the newer standards, which have addressed some of the issues.