As someone who started out in the game industry in 1990, I can say that being able to choose between competently-built game engines is a HUGE bonus. At last co

As someone who started out in the game industry in 1990, I can say that being able to choose between competently-built game engines is a HUGE bonus. At last count I'd written six (!!) game engines. Nothing huge; mostly "casual" games as the target. One of those engines ended up having over a hundred published games written for it, though, so at least in that case I got some decent traction. And honestly? If at any of the times I was starting a game engine, I could have just sat down and focused on _writing the game_? I would have taken that option and not looked back. You have to make a decision, when it comes down to it: Do you want to write a game? Or do you want to build a game engine? Because writing a complete game engine can take 2-3 years all on its own. And yes, that's counting gluing together existing libraries. I never wrote, e.g., a PNG or JPG loader from scratch. The engine with 100+ games? I started work at PlayFirst and immediately started working on the game engine. Nearly six years later when I quit to work on my own games, I was _still_ adding features to the engine. Games were certainly released before that; the first game I released was probably only six months in. But the game engine (Playground) wasn't very mature yet, and it wasn't until at least 2-3 years in that using the engine really had a robust set of features (including cross-platform support). And if you're looking at creating a 3d game, and don't want to start with an engine? Well, it can be done, but again, if your time budget is three years, at least half that time will be working on parts and fixing bugs that a solid engine would have handled for you. If your time horizon is shorter, then expect even more of your time to be spent reinventing the wheel. Source: I spent 20 years in the game industry.