Most games are not created from scratch. To avoid having to reinvent the wheel with each game, developers use engines and tools to create a starting point. However, these engines are built in different ways with different priorities, and one developer catalogued how different the idea of "nothing."

The "Nothings Suite" by experimental game developer Pippin Barr (creator of the chess monsters "Chesses" and "Chogue") explores what happens when you launch a game engine and immediately export what the editor spits out, and how each tool is a viable It is a collection of the absolute minimum that each tool considers software.

Not surprisingly, the "Nothings Suite" includes a lot of blank screens; many of the tools (like Bitsy and Ren'Py) include basic projects that quickly introduce the basics of how the engine works.

It is fun to compare Unity and Unreal, the big 3D engines on this list; it is worth noting that Unity and Unreal simply show a static skybox, but even have cameras to view it. Unreal, by contrast, is practically extravagant, allowing you to fly freely around a basic scene with lighting and solid blocks of geometry. Unreal is substantially more lavish, allowing you to fly freely around a basic scene with blocks of lighting and solid geometry, and while Unreal is more flashy and impressive, it has a massive 31 MB.

Nothing Suite opened last week with 14 entries and has since added four more (including Atari 2600 and older tools for creating DOS games). The whole thing is free, and most of it runs in your browser. However, the "Print And Play" entry may require a printer for a single blank PDF.

This is not the first time Barr has focused on a very specific aspect of game development: in 2017, the developer opened v r 3, a gallery cataloging dozens of ways to render water in Unity.