> None of these are nearly as hard as cult-of-always-use-an-engine makes them out to be.
I never said they were _hard_, but they take time. Time that can be spent on your game.
> You don't have to wait for Unity to support a new platform, or fix a bug that's blocking you, or implement a feature you want, you just do that yourself.
Every system has bugs. You're always going to have to make tradeoffs when building projects, and building an entire framework from scratch to avoid those bugs is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You're trading the possibility of at some point in the future being blocked from developing a very specific part of your game for the guarantee of spending time up front yak shaving.
> Hell, Jonathan Blow is a successful game developer who made his own engines for Braid and The Witness, and now he's gone as far as making his own language and compiler to make games with going forward because he feels C++'s eccentricities get in the way too much.
Blow has shipped two games in 20 years, and one of those (braid) predates _any_ of the existing engines being free and easily accessible. Another of the "build it from the ground up" camp is Casey Muratori, who started handmade hero almost 8 years ago, and is nowhere even close to a game. The post we're commenting on here is entitled "Accidentally Making a Language, for an Engine, for a Game". If your take away from those things is that "you'll spend more time fighting the engine" then I don't really know what else to say.
You say that like it is a bad thing. By (nearly) all accounts Braid and The Witness are lovingly and expertly crafted, unconventional, and brilliant games. He's not making the annual Madden or Call of Battlefield here.
> Casey Muratori, who started handmade hero almost 8 years ago, and is nowhere even close to a game
Be fair to Casey, Handmade Hero is primarily an educational project and he only devotes a few hours to it each week. Though admittedly he has allowed the scope to creep quite a bit from the original goals.
> The post we're commenting on here is entitled "Accidentally Making a Language, for an Engine, for a Game". If your take away from those things is that "you'll spend more time fighting the engine" then I don't really know what else to say.
My point is more that I'm kind of sick of people being so down on the concept of building your own engine even for relatively simple 2D games. Yes, I agree that it takes time, but so does learning the ins and outs of an existing engine and the time you invest in the latter nets you less generalizable skills than the former and leaves you with less control over the end product. It is a tradeoff, and like all tradeoffs there are good reasons to go one way or another.
I never said they were _hard_, but they take time. Time that can be spent on your game.
> You don't have to wait for Unity to support a new platform, or fix a bug that's blocking you, or implement a feature you want, you just do that yourself.
Every system has bugs. You're always going to have to make tradeoffs when building projects, and building an entire framework from scratch to avoid those bugs is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. You're trading the possibility of at some point in the future being blocked from developing a very specific part of your game for the guarantee of spending time up front yak shaving.
> Hell, Jonathan Blow is a successful game developer who made his own engines for Braid and The Witness, and now he's gone as far as making his own language and compiler to make games with going forward because he feels C++'s eccentricities get in the way too much.
Blow has shipped two games in 20 years, and one of those (braid) predates _any_ of the existing engines being free and easily accessible. Another of the "build it from the ground up" camp is Casey Muratori, who started handmade hero almost 8 years ago, and is nowhere even close to a game. The post we're commenting on here is entitled "Accidentally Making a Language, for an Engine, for a Game". If your take away from those things is that "you'll spend more time fighting the engine" then I don't really know what else to say.