the issue is that i've had this idea for a game running around in my head for probably years at this point but i have NO idea what engine to make it in and every one that i try sucks

godot:

• + developed the initial prototype in this.
• ~ worked? but felt very awkward
• - i'm not a huge fan of gdscript for larger projects that involve a lot of non-godot related state management (though c# could maybe fix this)
• - honestly godot's just kinda always felt a little weird to me

rust:

• + i appreciate the design philosophy of rust
• + it'd be nice to have invalid states be unrepresentable, guaranteed memory safety, fast runtimes, etc
• - rust is haaaard
• ~ i'm not sure how i'd show visuals and all. rust gamedev tools are somewhat immature for my liking and compiling rust to use in other things is something i've never tried

html5:

• + quick iteration compared to traditional compiled engines
• + i'm very familiar with html/css/js, this is my bread and butter
• - it's literally a website. i'm more keen on aiming for traditional marketplaces (i.e. steam, itch.io) which presents the issue of "how do i make an executable for this"
  • which then turns into "do i really want to make this an electron app" and the answer is always no

what do other people use for zachlike games

new idea: the worst of both worlds, a rust backend running the main logic, with an html5/css frontend to display things all nice and pretty. tauri gluing the two together. i hate this fucking idea but it's the one that seems to be developing