Comment by bitwize
9 months ago
If you're serious about making video games, you should probably be using a commercial engine. Period. No exceptions. Unless you're EA or Microsoft, you're just not going to develop a custom engine that can compete with Unity and Unreal. You may be able to write a good basic rendering pipeline and event loop, but the major engines have enormous ecosystems of tooling and talent, ready to go, and they're available across all major platforms including proprietary consoles. Things will go much, much easier for you if you just use those.
If you're just fucking around, do what you want, but if you actually want to ship, it's Unity or Unreal all the way.
And no, I don't think Godot is "there" yet. If Unreal is Photoshop, then Unity is Photopea and Godot is GIMP.
Just off the top of my head, Celeste, Super Meat Boy, Fez, Spelunky, Dead Cells, Braid, and The Witness all use custom engines and are widely considered some of the best indie games of all time. Moreover, I think much of their charm and uniqueness stem directly from the amount of custom engine work involved. Writing your own engine lets you focus on the details that make your game stand out in a crowded field.
Your assertion seems silly.
In fact, the article is by one of the devs of Celeste.
Agree with your sentiment.
But Spelunky was written in Game Maker Studio.
The original Spelunky, but not HD. The devs talked about how they started out with the Braid engine and then just rolled their own.