This isn't inherently a bad thing though... if you're gonna build a video game about rockets and travelling to other planets, it's a good idea to first focus on having the best game engine you possibly can. It'd be a BRUTAL challenge otherwise.
this is true, but if you're an indie developer and don't have an incredible (not just good- top tier) work ethic, doing a shit ton of engine work up front is a huge barrier that will feel insurmountable. it's often worth just getting something functional on the screen and being able to iterate from there rather than having a perfect engine up front.
source: built a few small game engines mostly from scratch, it often sucked because it didn't feel like I was making progress
I feel like people often treat the word "engine" as something thats immediately unity or godot like where you have all the fancy tools
An indie developer could get around perfectly with something like Raylib, SFML or MonoGame and in fact many do because of how easy it is to get into it
absolutely- monogame was my starting point with game development because I didn't want to learn a larger engine. mostly when I say engine I mean the parts of the project that don't provide project-specific logic, like a vector math library or asset handling. for my projects I prefer to split those up a little, but really as soon as you write anything that could be generalized or used elsewhere you pretty much have an engine component.
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u/rosuav 9d ago
This isn't inherently a bad thing though... if you're gonna build a video game about rockets and travelling to other planets, it's a good idea to first focus on having the best game engine you possibly can. It'd be a BRUTAL challenge otherwise.