I’ve been working in the games industry as a programmer for 21 years and I’ve seen this so many times. I also used to see it on gamedev.net and flipcode.com. Very technical people, engine programmers, think they can make a game and seem to think that all it takes is an engine and don’t even think about the game part. They tinker endlessly with file formats, memory allocators, vector math libraries, pooled string classes, etc and never finish anything when they could have just used json and png files and actually shipped something. On PC for the scale of game most indie developers will make all of that stuff isn’t really necessary. And if you find it is necessary then you can refactor later.