Just going to add my random 2¢ this is what engineers do (I'm an engineer). All they can see is the tech and ok, maybe that's that they enjoy but it really has

Just going to add my random 2¢ this is what engineers do (I'm an engineer). All they can see is the tech and ok, maybe that's that they enjoy but it really has little to do with a hit game (here come the comments ;) It's like claiming that most movies couldn't be made unless will build our own cameras from scratch. The thing is, building engines and tools is conceptually easy. It might be a lot of work but it's mostly known solutions so we (engineers like me) see a big todo list and just do it. We get in the flow. We get proud of our solutions (even though 40k new games shipped this month that some how solved the same problems). But arguably the real work is in design and design is much harder, at least for me, because it's a blank slate. I don't have to reinvent how to read joypads or stream files or serialize data. Sure I might write my own but it's arguably a waste of time. They real hard work is figuring out the game itself. Prototyping, trying out new ideas. Grab some working solutions (Unity, Unreal, or your favorite open source libraries, spend as little time as possible on tech and as much time as possible trying out ideas). Of course I write that advice and I've believed it for years but I still fall back to my engineering ways and find busywork to do like add some unit testing system or automate some other step. Meanwhile no prototypes. No games.