Comment by meheleventyone

I agree with almost everything except:

> Thing is - when you're writing an _engine_ you need all that. You don't get to tell people writing games that you don't really need shadows or that they need to limit the number of game objects to some number etc. But when you're writing a _game_ (and you can call part of that game the engine), suddenly you get to tweak things and exclude things in all these ways that are perfectly fine.

When you're making an engine it's perfectly fine to bake in constraints. Probably most famously PICO-8 does that very intentionally and is written by just one person. Similarly RPGMaker and a bunch of other 'genre specific' game engines also do this. It's just that everyone tries to make something super general purpose which is really a Sisyphean task.