Memories. Is this a lost art or do people still do this starting out? I mean now that everyone has unity to play with do people no longer have to know about the actual hardware?
Also https://www.dwitter.net/ uses canvas + JS as the basis for it's code golfing. It's surprising what you can fit into 140 characters, and forces you to think more mathematically when creating effects.
With audio, on the other hand, everyone will just look for fmod or an equivalent. There's rarely much time budgeted for audio and there's much less shared experience in doing it ground-up.
Even Claybook is based on Unreal, just with heavily customized rendering and physics systems.
Lead developer: https://twitter.com/SebAaltonen/status/977195448132775936
That you're using a handrolled engine is fine, I'm sure your company knows what they're doing. But in the context of this post, and for people who'd like to start game development/design, saying that most devs write their own engine is in my opinion damaging, as I really don't think that most smaller studios do. It increases the barrier to entry, and perpetuates a certain amount of elitism, which really considering the make up of the industry is no help at all.
A great amount of indies do. Super Meat Boy was built with a hand rolled engine. Same for Cave Story, Binding of Isaac, Terraria, Stardew Valley, Dwarf Fortress, Celeste and many other memorable titles.
It's more intense on the Japanese side though. Loads of -doujin- game developers, like the many Touhou spinoffs games handroll their own stuff.
I'd say, using a prebuilt engine ecosystem has become more common with the appearance and growth of Unity but it hasn't stopped people doing their own thing and it certainly hasn't been a solely positive contribution, you criticize elitism in the days when the Steam store pages are flooded by trashy asset flips and barely working early access games that sometimes never truly get finished. A little bit elitism would in fact not hurt if we don't want to hit another video game industry crash.
I mean, I posted 'cause he was wrong, but this is Bad Boss garbage.
An engine like unity basically provides utilities such as physically based rendering, camera systems, visual editors, scripting environments, a scenegraph editor, preview windows, io, asset import and conversion, audio, etc. Some games are of course easier to make than others in such engines, but they aren't that prescriptive.
What you're missing is that these big engines are also game development environments with extensive tools and integrated market places to purchase assets and features.
Learning Unity is learning an entire platform. It's a marketable skill.
Generally smaller developers don't have the development resources to roll custom everything. But modern platforms have enough spare hardware resources that the inefficiencies of Unity are worthwhile.
However I believe this will change in the future and we will go full circle back to people rolling their own for real world use... why? because modern real-time rendering engines are an amalgamation of hacks on how to get beleivability out of triangles and shaders, they are necessarily complex - to the extreme - and you cannot compete as an individual. However the future is clearly path-tracing or some form of ray based rendering (it's sustainable, the hardware has a future there - it's parallel), path tracing being a simpler unified model for rendering makes it's completely within the grasp of individual developers, this would open up a whole world of creativity.
http://slicker.me/javascript/fire/fire.htm
(not mine)
There are similar demos out there using particle effects.