I only wonder because I recall the reason they built an engine from scratch for The Witness was to achieve certain lighting goals, and that specific feel and style I have never encountered quite like that in any other game.
A lot of that is down to art and direction, but there's a raw quality of the lighting that just feels different to any game I have played. You can often feel a game's engine out if it's one of the big ones, through the feeling of its lighting. I suspect since all engines have certain default approaches and settings in their lighting setups and devs only move the knobs as far as they need to meet their artistic goals, leaving much alone.
I don’t buy that. Even back then, as an indie developer, the only reason you build your own engine is because you want to build your own engine.
You have to be doing something truly technically impressive to need a new engine and The Witness wasn’t pushing the envelope.
He had help from another developer specifically for that issue.
Just a guess based on the way he's spoken about it, but I'd expect an open beta in December-February. I'm not expecting that to be open source though (maybe the engine will be but not the language, unclear).
He has a very limited view of what is required of software.
The problem is that he's not entirely wrong. The JavaScript-ification of everything is kind of a problem. Electron apps everywhere is an issue.
But a lot of issues are also just trying to deal with bad actors. Doing authentication or authorization wrong can have real consequences. And it is incredibly difficult. Because security is in opposition to access. And trying to make security invisible is even more difficult.
What is a game save file if not persisted state?
Compared to if you run a cloud storage company, a corrupted file might annoy a user that pays $1m every month, to store data that they themselves make money on, etc.
The stakes for a game save are a lot lower.
However Order of the Sinking Star is also made in a custom programming language and custom engine. This is not at all normal for game development. There also doesn't appear to be a scripting system. Normally you have an engine built in C++ or something fast, and then a scripting system where you write a higher level language to script how the game runs. Engine development is more separate from scripting development. With Order of the Sinking Star, the game engine appears to be much more just like a library, and the same codebase runs the engine and game logic, with no scripting layer, as far as I can figure out from public hints.