i think the reason game engine discourse has been annoying me, as someone who uses a big proprietary game engine, is that i keep seeing people imply that using a big engine makes you uhhh.... worse at game design or at least worse at realization of your game designs or something
like usually not that directly but i mean sentiments like, famous developer X used a custom engine for popular game Y, you think they could have done that shit in game maker 🤣 (in TWO of these posts X was maddy thorson which made me break out in hives) or bizarre statements about how, y'know, unity games just feel worse to play, or about how modern indie games are all bland copies of each other because of premade character controllers and asset stores (a cultural complaint that has fuck all to do with what you can accomplish in any given engine, setting aside whether it's even true....)
(edit: i want to note that some of the people who said the stuff above that set me off have talked to me about it and clarified what point they were trying to make or revised it, and i don't have hard feelings toward them....)
these posts usually also make a lot of good points that i agree with about small frameworks vs. big engines, like that they give you control and ownership over your work, you aren't beholden to big corporations (or the maintainers of godot), your code will be more lightweight and flexible from a software architecture standpoint....
i think the disconnect is that i basically use big game engines as if they were frameworks.... game maker, to me, is something that provides window management, a basic game loop, sprite and font rendering, audio playback, input handling, collision detection (aabb and pixel-precise), room/scene management, and a slightly janky but familiar scripting language. that's not a lot more than what my friends who use love2d get, or what i've seen "make your own engine" posters say you get from sdl2. and of course, game maker provides even more than that, like a 2d physics engine and networked multiplayer, which i have so far ignored, but they're there for me if i want to use them.
i could transfer my knowledge to a smaller framework, and i've considered it before, but it'd take a lot of research and effort to get back to parity with what i can do easily in game maker after using it for 20 years. and aside from the actual runtime api, game maker also provides a gui for setting up sprite origin points and collision data, and for importing and setting properties on other assets like fonts and audio, and it provides a general-purpose (and extremely convenient) level editor. i've made custom level editors for games that were too complex to use game maker's built in one, and it's annoying! i've never made a custom program for editing sprite properties and i don't want to, i'd probably just end up using aseprite to find the right pixels and enter them directly in code. game maker packs textures into an atlas for me automatically. i wonder how many folks writing their own engine are also writing their own texture atlas generation vs. using someone else's library.
to me the big difference is that game maker is (mostly) closed source and i'm beholden to the decisions of a large corporation, that i don't decide what dependencies i pull in because it's all one big package, and that i can only modify the game architecture at a high level, meaning i'm stuck with game maker's paradigms for lower level decisions. and those are valid criticisms of tools like unity and game maker! i just don't get why people also want to argue that these tools are not a viable way to make games (obviously false??) or that they prevent you from having fine control over your game's mechanics and feel (the stuff i don't have fine control over is like, how draw call batching works, or whether yoyo games broke basic functionality in the web export again with their latest update)
i think heavyweight general-purpose game engines and lightweight general-purpose frameworks can make roughly the same kinds of games, and your success at realizing your vision is going to depend mostly, if not almost entirely, on your level of general game development and programming experience. like for example, if you know how to write a custom character controller, you can probably do it in any environment once you learn the basics, and if you don't, you're going to be copying code from tutorials whether you're using an engine or a framework....
