I'm a bit late to the party, but I've been making my own game engine for about 3 years now, and here are my few cents on whether or not to roll your own game engine, how to do that, and what a game engine even means:
https://lisyarus.github.io/blog/programming/2023/09/15/so-you-want-to-make-a-game-engine.html
@lisyarus "Look carefully at your code. Think which parts can be isolated and separated to be reused later. Think about how exactly you’d want to use these parts. Extract them into a new project, – this is your engine now."
This is so important. Write the use cases first (i.e. the games), then figure out what is similar between them, then draw a line through the code. That's your API! Anything else is just being an "architecture astronaut".
@lisyarus Hi Nikita, I'm very happy to hear there is still people in the world creating custom engines. 😉
I've been working on my 2D framework since 2011. Should you be interested, I shared some notes when the project reached ten years: https://encelo.github.io/2021-06-21-ten-years-ncine/
paul
Nikita Lisitsa
Tom Forsyth
Otávio Carneiro
maciek glowka
Angelo Theodorou 
