I get the feeling there is a serious survivor bias happening here. Individuals who are talented and knowledgable enough to roll their own engine, make it well and quick enough, maintain motivation AND cross the finish line to actually make a game likely make a pretty good game. Now consider all the other people who tried this path and got stuck along the way. Now you're gonna recommend all that complexity and difficulty to someone because you think games should "feel" unique. Like, its just not based in reality sorry.

I think there are 2 reasons to roll your own game engine

1. Making a game isn't your top priority and you're interested in game engines

2. No existing game engine does what you need it to do and you have enough experience/knowledge to know where you're going

If you're decision is based on "I want my game to feel unique", "it might not be performance enough" or some other immaterial and ethereal concept I fear you're gonna be set up for failure.

Noita is a perfect example of when to roll your own. They push the boundaries so much that they absolutely need a custom engine. Path of Exile, another example where their vision REQUIRED a custom game engine.

1. Engine choice is only a factor in performance. If you build an unoptimised game it will run poorly. Doesn't matter if you do it in Unity or your own engine. 2. Terraria, etc did not succeed because they use their own engines. 3. Those bad performance games have bad performance and happen to use an engine, not the other way round. 4. The quality of your game has a lot more to do with effort, care, etc than the engine you choose to use. You can create a buggy piece of crap no matter how you make it 5. Performance alone is a bad reason to roll your own engine. "Existing engines are not performant so you should roll your own" is a very bad piece of advice. 6. Making a good engine is HARD and a lot of effort. There is no guarantee that you produce anything better because you chose that path.

I don't think it's a good idea to use someone else's perceived lack of empathy as an excuse to not be sympathetic.

I mean, lets be real, the way LLMs have been unleashed on the world has not been an overall positive. Don't misconstrue that to be me saying LLMs and AI is useless though, I am not! Can AI be an overall positive one day? Absolutely yes; I think its a guarantee really. Is AI useful right now? Yep. What I'm saying is the negative now outweighs the positive now because of how its being used, narratives and excuses around it.

Maybe you can describe what the various forms of tech debt are that you are talking about?

To be clear, I am not making a statement as to whether AI reasons or not. Its just slippery to say something isn't or can't do X when we can't really define X. Perhaps if we can put it down as an outcome rather than an, in my opinion, currently impossible to accurately define characteristic of a thing.

It's hard to tell what your blog posts are actually about because the titles are so cryptic. May I ask if you find any benefit from naming posts in way that makes it difficult to know what you are about to write about? I'm guessing it's purely creative which is totally fine.