[joeld42]

I'm writing my own engine. That's a terrible idea, I'd be much better off with either unity or unreal. But since game dev is more of a hobby for me, and writing the engine is the fun part, I'm ok with that.

However, for smallish projects (smaller than Republic Sniper, I mean) sometimes it's the right choice. I see a lot of indies struggling with lugging around and maintaining a huge engine (unity, especially, but even cocos2d), and running up against the limitations like difficulty integrating with native sdk features, and their game's requirements are modest enough that they could probably code it from scratch in not too much time.

[erikb]

Also hacking together a development environment through different open source projects and own code is not a bad idea. It's harder in the beginning but also gives you more control and more skill in the long run.