[bombcar]

The other thing to remember is the games and the engines built together handle each other - Doom couldn't have a floor above another floor (engine limitation because of CPU limitations) so the level designers created tricks to make it feel like it did.

When you're designing both you can take advantage of features you add but also avoid the ones you can't do well - or even change the art style to "fit" the engine - pixelated angular mobs fit Minecraft quite well, but once they start getting more and more detailed you're in an "uncanny valley" where they look worse and more dated than Minecraft - until you finally have enough polygons to render something decent.

[amjoshuamichael]

Oh, absolutely. I maintain the engine for my video game and it's ultra-minimal tailored to my needs. That leads to better performance, and a much slimmer build size. (currently sitting at ~900KB for the optimized build of a nontrivial game, assets bundled separately). It's also a better development experience, imo.

My argument was mainly about these more generalized engines, like raylib, 'Tramway', or Source.