I often hear the advice to "make games, not game engines", and it's refreshing to hear it from someone who is actually working on an engine themselves, because usually when I hear this advice it's from devs who use Unity/Godot/Unreal, and the implication I get is that if you're not using one of those engines, you're wasting your time and won't ever make a game.

But I'd say there's a middle ground between using an existing engine and making your own general-purpose engine from scratch. I've been making a 2D RTS using C++/SDL, and it's taken me longer to write it this way than if I had used an existing engine, but in only a few months I've reached the point where I have a prototype and have had multiple playtests and am iterating the prototype based on feedback from those playtests.

So, while the advice "make games, not game engines" is still definitely true, it doesn't mean that if you code "from scratch" that your game will necessarily be a long 4-year engine project (unless you want it to be!). The trick is to keep the code specific to the game you're working on and to avoid the urge to abstract everything / make everything general-purpose.

Yep this is of course one possible way too. Make a game from scratch but don't make an engine.

I personally I'm not capable of executing this strategy because my mind is always thinking in terms of abstractions and how to make things so re-usable in another context/project when the time comes. For better or worse this means that for me any "game from scratch" project will immediately turn into "engine + game from scratch" project :)

I suspect it also helps if your engine can ingest content made in existing editors, or uses off-the-shelf libraries for e.g. the nitty gritty.

I want to make sure you understand that games as art genre and old resource limited and low level programs are far away from each other now. And moving in different directions at light speed. Unless one builds something that should be donated to a museum on release one does not need more of C++/SDL.

I say that as someone who keeps working as mostly C++ contributor into internal game engines for various projects.

I would want people to look forward and make works of art that expand what we thought was possible more instead of 'learning low level programming'.

This is exactly why I ended up going for Godot with my own hobby game. I have made a lot of progress on a custom game engine in the past without actually having a game to make in mind. It always gets to the point where you have to start making decisions about the tooling, and that becomes your main focus.

No disrespect or put downs of anyone trying to do their own thing, but Godot is a really great engine and is open source. It's kind of miracle that we live in a world where there is a viable open source engine for commercial grade 2d games and the whole thing is MIT licensed.

For me, a great middle ground is building an engine similar to fantasy consoles (PICO-8, TIC-80, etc.)

This type of project is small enough to plan all the elements before you start (which helps to stick to the design and therefore to avoid feature creep). Yet, it is still complex enough to provide entertainment and challenge.

This approach also has the advantage – at least it is an advantage in the case of side projects – that you can see the results of your work quite quickly.

I'm working on such a project myself, and it is a great experience. Although to tell the truth, it is more of a "game creation kit" than an engine.

I think the trap people fall into is to have things be overly specific in the name of optimization they never get to achieving anyway.

For instance, I find you can get massive mileage by declaring “(almost) everything is instanced”, then you batch it, forget it, move on. There are similar shortcuts to be made with physics and so on.

The close to ideal engine, in terms of approaches to problems, was LittleBigPlanet. That was a small team that were really good, but crucially they had the right way to frame the problems so as to constrain the emergent complexity of the result.

"I think the trap people fall into is to have things be overly specific in the name of optimization they never get to achieving anyway."

Yes I agree, writing a specific functionality in the engine does allow for more optimal performance but the tradeoff is that it's more brittle and more complicated to write and maintain.

My personal approach has been to do the first principles and avoid writing use-case specific features in the engine as much as possible but provide more fundamental functionality that the game then combines to create the desired effect.

That being said I've still had to do some concessions and move stuff like simple constant velocity game object integration to the engine side simply because the perf difference between native code doing that vs Lua code are just too massive.

A question then, I have run some game servers in my time that had quite advanced console options and scripts to run, in Lua, which I then saw as maybe the most common language in this area. But I wondered where and why Lua which is its own full language was kept to a certain part of the game and running instance, and where the other runtime and the games main language differed. How is that division of responsibility separated or chosen I guess?

There's no single answer to this, it all depends on the game, the engine and the team(s) executing the engine and game.

Some typical ways to divide this though is

Some org has "engine" team and "game" team. Engine team implements features in the engine itself and game team implements game specific features using the embedded scripting language.

Engine features are game agnostic and game features are specific to games and are scripted / built-on top of the engine features.

But sometimes things get muddled as general purpose engines are used in games that require specific features in the engine itself. Typically the decision is then made by a) what kind of feature and how does it fit in the architecture of the engine b) what are the performance requirements c) who is willing to do the work and maintain it

I want to write a slot machine “game” for a custom slot machine I’ve built using a piece of MDF, a 32” LCD, and a Linux single board computer.

I haven’t found much information on how to write a game in this style with existing engines. Any advice or resources you would point a noob too? I am a software engineer but not a game programmer.

It doesn’t have to be so good as a real slot machine (regulations and such) but I do want to follow the rules as best I can. I may not use a real hardware RNG.

Maybe re-assess if a game engine is needed for your use case? A slot machine doesn't really need a whole ass game engine, you could do it with pretty much any graphics library.

Isn’t this what Godot was originally for?