| 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!) -- 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 :) -- 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. |