[vector_spaces]

Right, I think the usual point here that if your goal is to make a game, then this is usually the painful route and conveniently one that up-fronts the likely more exciting and comfortable part for a software engineer, namely the software engineering. It also tends to defer the very important business of learning rather quickly whether our idea even leads to a fun game in the first place

That said, it's still a worthwhile exercise that one can learn a lot from.

[kyzcdev]

Balance is required for everything. There was a youtuber called Randy, he tried to build everything from scratch using C and it took him 6-7 years to finally release a game. Meanwhile I watched a youtuber who just made games from fake-ads in Unity and marketed it well and earned bunch of money.

Do we want money or do we want to get the pleasure of being an engineer and make money as a side quest?

There was a video of tsoding about why he doesn't have a job, he says "when I have enough money for my needs I just go into coding instead of working". I like his vision. He likes coding for the sake of programming and earns money as a side quest.

[lstodd]

There is another angle: what if you want to express yourself, but, say, Unity is too limiting? Existing game engines were made to express existing ideas and while there is some stretch they do have hard limits.

[jamiejquinn]

Hard agree. AFAIK Jon Blow's Braid couldn't be made with an existing engine (at the time) due to its time warping mechanics.

That's a big reason I like developing games with frameworks. It allows reusibility and access to clever code, while still remaining flexible enough to support weird mechanics.