You technically can, but you really shouldn't. The general knowledge is that you can make a game or you can make an engine - not both.

There's just so much you don't know until you do, and there's a reason even all those "render engine" libraries have fallen kinda defunct (Ogre, Irlicht, etc). It's hard and distracts from the real goal.

Just grab an engine and get started on the game day 1 with a tool that can guarantee any game can be made with studio-quality tooling and compatibility.

It's the same reason you grab a date time library. It sure seems totally doable to "just handle times" right up until you try.

If making an engine was really that easy, studios wouldn't pay tens of millions to avoid doing it. Godot 3D would be solved by now.