> “Make games, not engines” is fine advice in general but you can make an engine for your specific game without making that engine look like Unity. You don’t need a sophisticated custom level editor, you can just use something off the shelf like Tiled. You don’t need an extension language (like C# or Lua), you can just do the whole engine + game in one project, with one language.

Note that the original meaning behind "Make games, not engines" was exactly that (IIRC when it was originally written in a blog post that somehow became popular, Unity was still a MacOS-only engine and other engines were prohibitively expensive to indies), not that you should avoid making engines.

Basically it was about focusing on making the game and have your engine implement just the features your game needs, not the feature some theoretical game might need in the future. It was an advice meant warn against scope creep.

Also it was directed towards people who actually wanted to make games with their engines and it wasn't directed towards people who just wanted to focus on the tech side (even though the advice was still to have some sort of demo game to drive things).

Somehow over the years people started using the phrase as if it meant "stick with making games, do not bother making engines".