Comment by Lichtso
9 months ago
Made me realize that most of the games I really enjoyed have their own custom engines (made for a single game or franchise): Starbound, Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Factorio, RollerCoaster Tycoon, Empire Earth, The Sims, Project Zomboid ...
Only exception might be Portal, but even that is using an in-house solution mostly for developed for one franchise.
Like with most things: If you are new and have to learn everything or if you actually need to pump titles out you should prefer quantity over quality and the major game engines are the way to go. But, if you really want to polish something it will require a long long time and then investing in engine development can pay off. The trap is starting with the later if you haven't made a few dozen games yet and never shipped anything. Then it will stay that way.
Just to clarify, are you saying that if you've never shipped any games then you should start with an established engine and only go artisanal once you have that experience?
Yes, pretty much. I don't say the custom engine first path can't work, heck I did ship my own games on custom engines first myself, but it is probably not the path of least resistance.
This... I don't think I've ever truly enjoyed a Unity game. Maybe KSP, but it runs like shit and isn't a good advertisement for that engine. Even Unreal Engine: I've only enjoyed Unreal itself.
There are definitely some Unity games I've really liked - the Ori games, Hollow Knight - but the engine has never been a positive of my experience with the game. They're full of jank and physics bugs, and in a weird hard to describe way kind of feel "alike". You know you're playing a Unity game, which is bizarre for a part of the game experience that's so low level.