[wxkn]

Game engines are super interesting. The variety of different things happening in the program, the audio/visual aspect, the real-time nature of the application. It's exciting to work on. It just feels like there is a software machine chugging forward.

A few years ago I made a mostly crappy 2D arcade game with a custom engine ("Fractus" on Steam). It basically started as a way to learn graphics tech and try out some visualization ideas. Slowly it turned into a real project. For a long time the journey of creating an engine was the main thing. Unfortunately, I think this shows in the final game quality... still working on that. I remember reading a post about having a "forever project". It's that piece of software that you keep going back to hack on because it feels good. I find a graphics engine to be a good choice for this.

If you have an idea/design/plan for a game, you probably shouldn't make your own engine without a compelling reason. But what if you don't really have an idea, yet still want to get into the programming side of games? Try working on a toy engine!