> Blow has shipped two games in 20 years You say that like it is a bad thing. By (nearly) all accounts Braid and The Witness are lovingly and expertly crafted,

> Blow has shipped two games in 20 years You say that like it is a bad thing. By (nearly) all accounts Braid and The Witness are lovingly and expertly crafted, unconventional, and brilliant games. He's not making the annual Madden or Call of Battlefield here. > Casey Muratori, who started handmade hero almost 8 years ago, and is nowhere even close to a game Be fair to Casey, Handmade Hero is primarily an educational project and he only devotes a few hours to it each week. Though admittedly he has allowed the scope to creep quite a bit from the original goals. > The post we're commenting on here is entitled "Accidentally Making a Language, for an Engine, for a Game". If your take away from those things is that "you'll spend more time fighting the engine" then I don't really know what else to say. My point is more that I'm kind of sick of people being so down on the concept of building your own engine even for relatively simple 2D games. Yes, I agree that it takes time, but so does learning the ins and outs of an existing engine and the time you invest in the latter nets you less generalizable skills than the former and leaves you with less control over the end product. It is a tradeoff, and like all tradeoffs there are good reasons to go one way or another.