I’ve written before about how November 2025 was an inflection point for coding agents—the point where Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1 crossed a tipping point that meant their respective coding agents …
For me, it depends on what is defined as an engine.
If an engine is a suite of prepackaged tools and editors—e.g. Unreal, Unity, Godot, etc.—then I dislike game engines.
If an engine is more like a library, or a framework—e.g. Raylib, SDL, LÖVE, etc.—then I very much prefer working with an engine.
I suppose the difference is akin to operating systems: on one hand, we have full suites of software, such as the BSDs and Godot; on the other, we have lots of seperate software, like Linux distros and SDL (+ the code and asset editors of choice).
My exception to all of this is writing ROMs for console emulators, and fantasy consoles like PICO-8.
It’s why I don’t use engines!
I couldn’t imagine using an engine for a jam game and getting what I want out of the jam.
But I can respect that decision, because for some folks it’s the vision, for others it’s the marketing, for some it’s making the assets.
There are a lot of pieces that go into making something that stands out.
For me, it depends on what is defined as an engine.
If an engine is a suite of prepackaged tools and editors—e.g. Unreal, Unity, Godot, etc.—then I dislike game engines.
If an engine is more like a library, or a framework—e.g. Raylib, SDL, LÖVE, etc.—then I very much prefer working with an engine.
I suppose the difference is akin to operating systems: on one hand, we have full suites of software, such as the BSDs and Godot; on the other, we have lots of seperate software, like Linux distros and SDL (+ the code and asset editors of choice).
My exception to all of this is writing ROMs for console emulators, and fantasy consoles like PICO-8.