[Bekwnn]

It's a much better quote than the annoyingly common, "Don't write a game engine!"

If you work in games or want to work in games, writing a game engine is a very valuable experience. Probably the best thing you can work on for personal growth.

That said, I think you get substantially more value out of the experience if you've already gotten your feet wet making games with a commercial engine.

[kragen]

Well, one day last week I wrote this game http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/invaders without a game engine. Then I decided that it would be a lot better with a game engine, so I wrote a game engine for it http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/qj2d.js and rewrote the game over the next couple of days with the engine http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/qvaders. Then during the rest of the week I used the engine to write http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/qabbits and http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/offscreen † but both of which were a lot easier to write with the engine than they would have been without it, and for which I had to improve the engine, which also improved the Invaders game.

Now obviously QJ2D is not going to replace Godot or even LÖVE2D or TIC-80. It's a couple of days' worth of work, less than 200 lines of code; anyone could have done it. And nobody else is going to use it unless they have Greek letters on their keyboard. But not only did I learn a lot, it's also a substantial improvement for this kind of thing over the raw browser. I think I'll probably rewrite it differently for the next project, though...

I don't want to "work in games", but of course I enjoy writing games. I mean that's all computers are good for, really!

______

† not really games