[peteforde]

I've had my own rollercoaster relationship with Unity over the past decade, but telling people to roll their own game engine so that they can finally make a game is almost universally terrible advice.

People who want to build game engines should build game engines; people who want to build games should absolutely use Unity, Unreal or Godot in no particular order.

It's no different than needing to build a web framework so that you can make a website. The people who do it are often not even aware that they are procrastinating.

[andai]

People who are making a simple 2D web game don't need an engine, with rare exceptions. Chrome's 30 million lines is plenty of bloat to build on ;)

Besides, in this context you're already outsourcing all the code to Claude or Codex or whatever. i.e. a "programmer" who has no problem handling the engine side of things.

That being said, most enginedev is creative procrastination. Randy's recent video on this is very illuminating — "I thought if I made a really good engine, making the game would be the easy part!" So he avoided actually making a game for like ten years...

Most 2D games don't even need an engine: you can just make the game "directly", on top of SDL or Canvas or what have you. (That being said, noob friendly stuff like Processing and Kaboom is great and highly recommended!)

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Source: made lots of 2D games and a few engines. The engines were a complete waste of time. (Even ready made engines often did more harm than good!)

If I was making 3D games, then I would probably need an engine (but js13k begs to differ!), and it would probably not be a great to roll your own (unless you're going for something 90s themed :)

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Edit: Most of my games are very "programmer art", or very retro. If I were an artist or working with artists, then an engine would be useful for that, for the visual side of things. Flash was probably unmatched in that regard

That being said, it's not that hard to roll your own level editor, so... ;) even that argument is questionable.

Edit 2: Also the web APIs are unfortunately kind of ass, so using a library (or engine) has the advantage of letting you avoid dealing with them directly for the most part.

[tototrains]

Problems I've had with unity in my last 3 installs. All LTS default installations on windows. (I have delivered professional projects in Unity in the past):

1. Inspector for lists/arrays works once, crashes editor, must be restarted each time.

2. Race conditions in the basic animator functionality making animation events useless, killed a project because we couldn't edit the underlying code, didn't have time to redo animator-based functionality which should have worked in theory.

3. Segfaults in compiler -> 6 hours of debugging, gave up, still can't build reliably.

Each of these killed the workflow and therefore the ability to deliver the project dead, and were completely out of my control.

Vibe code your engine, at least you'll die on your own terms.

Unity is also just a fundamentally hostile organization waiting to pull the rug, as evidenced by their past behaviour.

Do not build your castle on someone else's land.