"On a walk today I was thinking about something specific that I think is under-discussed. Yes people bikeshed etc. but when you create your own engine you are _fiercely_ aware of _everything_ it can and can't do. As part of this, it's very easy to feel fully in command of your own toolset, and as such able to exhibit mastery over that toolset."
Yeah the really compelling thing to me is the knowledge building. For example what I do with my own project is that I take a look at some demo or example, let's say in Gamemaker or GDevelop and I ask myself a few questions:
a) how is the sausage made?
b) can I make the sausage and what are my ingredients?
c) if I can't make the sausage yet, what do I need in order to make the sausage?
For me this has been really the best way to build rather "deep" knowledge in this domain, as in knowing how something works under the hood (or how I think it works or at least how my version of it works) vs. knowing how to use it in Gamemaker / GDevelop.
Ps. your github could use some screenshots I think
It has been crazy to build an engine for this exact reason. You quickly see what you take for granted and what requires work to implement but "appears" effortless. Things that seem so obvious and core you quickly find don't come for free.
A simple example was that yesterday I was trying to debug why my MouseDown event wasn't firing every frame and was just firing once like MousePressed. After some digging in I realized that MouseDown isn't actually a primitive mouse event type in my platform wrapper code (Sokol). You get Up/Down. Doing this 1-to-1 wouldn't give people what they usually want (a MouseDown event that fires every frame), so you've got to figure out how to implement that yourself.
As for the Github, it's all a work in progress! I'm actively working on the engine but it isn't really "released" yet. I've got a very active dev branch and some docs I'm working on before I do a proper "reveal".
As for screenshots - what kind of stuff would you want to see? It's just a 2D engine so it's not like I have awesome graphics to show off. The point of it is that it's a code-only framework, there's no built-in editor or anything. I do want to have runnable embeds though of the demos!
Yeah the really compelling thing to me is the knowledge building. For example what I do with my own project is that I take a look at some demo or example, let's say in Gamemaker or GDevelop and I ask myself a few questions:
For me this has been really the best way to build rather "deep" knowledge in this domain, as in knowing how something works under the hood (or how I think it works or at least how my version of it works) vs. knowing how to use it in Gamemaker / GDevelop.Ps. your github could use some screenshots I think