[wudangmonk]

When designing anything like a language or library you always create the use cases first and then work backwards. Any game engine not created side by side with a game will be crap. Any 'cool feature' programming language without a decently sized codebase so serve as a beacon to guide you will expose all the flaws in the language that the creators never anticipated because they never created anything sufficiently complex.

Unless you are dogfooding whatever you create, it will be crap and you are better off not creating in the first place, don't waste everyone's time with stuff you yourself couldn't be bothered to actually use.

[jay-barronville]

My take is, if you’re not dogfooding what you’ve created, you either don’t believe in it or you didn’t have a need for it (i.e., likely a solution for a nonexistent problem). The latter is okay for fun and/or research/experimentation purposes, but at least make that clear so that everyone knows what to expect (or not expect).

[eru]

By that heuristic, only astronauts should be making space suits?

[JohnFen]

> if you’re not dogfooding what you’ve created, you either don’t believe in it or you didn’t have a need for it (i.e., likely a solution for a nonexistent problem)

That entirely depends on what sort of thing you're programming. My current job is programming for industrial equipment. I certainly don't, and won't ever, personally have a use for the software I write, but that software is 100% addressing a real problem.

[bbatha]

Remind me again which games were developed in house to dog-food Gambyro, Unity, Unreal 5, and Godot?

[wudangmonk]

Unreal was designed for the Unreal games, the others I have no clue but I doubt Unity has had any guiding game from my experience using it. Unity was built with the unity-store as its guide imho.