I love these projects so much. It must be exhilarating to work on them and I'm very tempted to work on one myself as a side project/self learning experience.
There's hundreds or thousands of these indie game engines because, yes!, it is a lot of fun to write them. You'd learn a lot. The #1 tip though is that you're writing a game, or an engine, not both. So commit to doing one of those tasks. Usually you end up with a bunch of toy games and no steam left to want to really polish them into something complete.
> The #1 tip though is that you're writing a game, or an engine, not both.
Not sure I agree. I have always done both.
Ostensibly I am writing a game but not using someone's engine. And then my own "engine" comes out of the effort.
Then I write a second game and pull over the rendering-sound-etc-code from the first game. This "engine" gets further refined as a result of being pressed into service for the new game.
Often it improves with each iteration and I move the newer version back to older games and refactor them as required.
> The #1 tip though is that you're writing a game, or an engine, not both.
Most of the people who follow this advice will never ship anything. Stop worrying and do what you want. It's okay to reinvent the wheel if you want to learn how to make a wheel, or if you just find it fun.
While I agree with your sentiment: most people who DON’T follow the advice will propably not ship anything either as shipping is hard and rare in any case.
Or if you need a special wheel adopted to your needs. Because you were annoyed, that the common generic wheels blasted the way you drove them ... but also could not use a expensive high performance wheel, because they come in different sizes.
(But remember, if you want to ship fast, or at all, usually better stay with the common wheels and sizes)
I wish AAA game developers would listen to this advice. How many times has trying to write a new game engine for one IP ended with the game in development hell?
No, 343 Industries, you don't need your own custom engine. Just use Unreal.
If you want to know about the really small indie ones that are less for actual use and more for just "I want to make a game engine" I would check out the various gamedev Discord and Reddit channels. There's always people showing off their work.
Phaser, as game engine, Pixi.js as a powerful render library (FRVR.com games were made formerly with Pixi.js). You can use Cocos Creator (not Cocos2D-x)
Can confirm; they're real fun. I've got a 7-year side-project I still grind on in the form of a voxel engine. The trick is to start small and have realistic expectations. Your progress will be glacially slow at first, and that's okay. Eventually, if you keep grinding, you'll have something awesome that you love working on.
If you want to check out my project there's a link in my bio.
Can confirm the first two years will suck if you’re starting from scratch. Keep with it. By the 4th year you’ll be able to use all your abstractions to whip up prototypes over the weekend.