Making Games Should Be As Fun As Playing Them
We built Summer because game development lost its flow state. Here is why we are reimagining the engine from scratch.
I love video games. I have played them my whole life. But making them? That has always been a different story.
I grew up painting and drawing and I've been doing so my entire life. I've always loved video games and I've always wanted to work on one. And I even took a sabbatical for six months to learn screenwriting because my ultimate goal was to go out and make games. But I was also brutally aware of the scale that it historically has taken to build games. Huge teams spending years to pull something off. But of course there are also indie games, just like there are indie movies. And it is not an excuse that I never really got started but that was until I saw AI could come in and fill the gaps that I had in my own technical abilities.
I wanted personally to design the characters, create the story, make the gameplay fun, and just have fun doing it as a way to express myself artistically and visually. But I spun up Unity back in the day and it was just a huge information overload of buttons and rendering and just the learning curve was immense. And I thought there must be an easier way to do this. A way to fill out my own gaps and weaknesses and that was where the process and the journey started.
Somewhere along the line, we accepted that playing games is fun, but making them is work. Hard, grinding, technical work. We accepted that for every hour of creative flow, we must pay a tax of ten hours of debugging, configuration, and boilerplate.
We have accepted that to make a game you have to risk everything and there is some beauty in that but also so many people with great ideas and great creative talent who has not had the opportunity or the chance to go out and make games because of the daunting task either because of time restrictions or financial restrictions as making games historically has taken years to complete.
We built Summer Engine to challenge that assumption.
The Lost Flow State
Remember when you were a kid playing with LEGOs? You didn't have to compile your castle. You didn't have to debug the physics of a plastic brick. You just had an idea, and you built it. The distance between "imagination" and "reality" was zero.
Modern game engines are miracles of engineering, but they have become incredibly dense. To move a character, you need a mesh, a rig, an animation controller, a state machine, a script, input mapping, and physics layers.
By the time you've set all that up, you've forgotten why you wanted to move the character in the first place. The feeling is gone.
Preserving the Creative Spark
This is why "vibe coding" resonates with so many people. It's not about being lazy. It's about preserving the creative spark.
When you tell Summer, "Make the jump feel floaty and magical," you are staying in the director's chair. You aren't calculating gravity vectors; you are designing a feeling.
You are making a story, you are making something that's fun, you are creating visual aesthetic and art direction, and you are making a game, not spending days or weeks on one single character to figure out how to get its arms and legs to move correctly.
We believe the engine should handle the implementation details so you can focus on the experience.
Why We Built an Engine
We looked at the existing tools (Unity, Unreal, Godot) and asked: Can we just add an AI sidebar to these?
The answer was no.
Existing engines assume a human is clicking every button. To make game dev truly conversational, we needed an engine that understands intent.
We built Summer on top of Godot because we respect open standards and professional power. But we fundamentally changed how you interact with it. We turned the engine from a tool you operate into a partner you collaborate with.
Since then we have also built out multiple new custom tools inside the engine making it our own and making it optimized for AI development workflows.
The Goal: 1:1 Creation
Our mission isn't to replace developers. It's to remove the friction that stops people from creating.
We want a world where making a game is as fun as playing it. Where you can sit down with an idea in the morning and be playing it with friends in the afternoon.
We made our own game Don't Pray in just 2.5 months and launched it on Steam. Full P2P networking, combat system, 6 classes, 4 game modes, 4 maps, and awesome mechanics. And we didn't crunch, we just stayed in the flow. We spent our time designing and playing, not wrestling with the tool or fighting syntax in the code.
We are building the engine we always wanted to use. We hope you'll build something amazing with it.
Thank you so much,
Mathias, dev at Summer Engine
Making it as fun to make games as it is to play them