Used to be. For many small devs/hobbyists, it's a matter of clicking in Unity and not actually "writing" anything.
Writing your own game engine (esp. 3D engine) is complex and challenging. Building a game in Unity is like putting Lego pieces together in comparison.
Agree with your other points though.
_ You could get lots of pre-made assets from the Unity store and cobble them together into some kind of 'game', but you'd be very limited in what you could do. Also more crucially you'd have diminishing returns as your project snowballs into a spaghettian nightmare, eventually becoming impossible to work on and unplayable for the bugs.
_ The whole writing a rendering engine in C++ and so on, isnt that big of a deal imo, its a solved problem say. The bane of any poorly composed software project is complexity, no matter what framework or engine you use, even Unity, you need clean code and a suitable architecture to make something complex and/or maintainable.
Unity is only "like putting together Lego blocks" in the sense that one very versatile brick and a few fairly trivial bricks are provided to you out of the box, but you'll still need to vacuum form your own set of specialized bricks for the rest of the game.
I am never one to say "don't reinvent the wheel". I think the phrase is universally used by malcontents to berate newbs. I think there is still a lot of value to be had in people starting new game engine projects. But if you want to make a game, rather than a game engine, you should probably be using Unity or Unreal. Making a game in Unity is absolutely a complex undertaking. Just not in the rendering shader code. Which is only a small part of any project.
They're planning to update to a newer version of C# and they will drop the other languages as a part of that update.
> Do you want to work for people who are too to small-minded to realise the benefits of game programming?
Some people can't judge the merits of game programming, that doesn't make them small minded. Depending on where you want to work, you may not have much of a choice in those terms anyway.
Rendering and shaders and 'technical' stuff are all, as I put it, solved, problems. You can read a book that will show you how to suitably implement them.
Managing the interactions between a dozen different and novel systems, however, is the part and where most seem to fail and what I'd consider the hard part.
Right, but the problem is those that do judge it in a systematically negative way.
On the other hand, if the position is about <X> and the applicant has half his experience in <Y> instead, that's going to be a negative (not necessarily a deal breaker) no matter what.
_ Do you want to work for people who are too to small-minded to realise the benefits of game programming?
_ Personally I would be honest, and try and find a job with pragmatic people, that I would enjoy and find rewarding.
_ What if you get a job with a 'serious' company only to discover that they are idiots and you quit after a few months?
_ In short, be yourself. You'll be happier.