A lot of people starting out have the same feeling as you. You want to know how everything works and you want everything to be "yours".

Good to know its not just me. But yes you are right, If I am going to make something I want it to be 100% mine. I know it sounds to selfish. :D

Another thing is that I have zero creativity. Guys like me end up making engines rather than a game.

Actually I have zero creativity too.

But i believe in practice. Before I was thinking the same thing.

If you have a great game idea then using a game engine makes more sense because now you can spend more time making the game instead of building an engine to support your game. Engine makes have take a lot of time to painstakingly optimize there code to support your end goal. The way I always think about it is if I use a game engine then it like adding that many extra programmers to your team for a low cost. Is it cheating if you hire 10 programmers to work on your project and code your engine and tools? Many times it just comes down the the ultimate question, Can I afford to hire 10 programmers or buy a decent game engine?

The other side of it is do you have 3-4 years to just work on your engine while building your game? If you have the extra time the sure code it yourself. But if you want this done in the next year then again using a game engine will help you get close to this goal. Even then many AAA game designers who use a game engine will still take several years to complete their project.

I like your analogy of using 10 programmers.

Actually I want to get into game industry. I believe that in order to break into that I got to understand the lower level stuff but I dont have the time to learn them all. If I do learn it, I maybe too old to get into game dev.

A practical example of how dangerous this attitude can get is the Handmade Hero project. A very interesting academic exercise, but the amount of time spent during that project on "reinventing" stuff at a relatively unclear boundary is astounding, and it shows in the amount of the time the project has gone on versus the currently available product. Nobody whose goal is actually to produce a game should be operating like that.

Is this the game your talking about

How long are they doing that.

You should thus find a way to tame this feeling of yours

This is the hardest part. I even dont know where is this coming from and why am i feeling this way.

Well, when I was your age we had none of them fancy engines. We had to code it all the way ourselves, barefeet through the snow and uphill in both directions. You kids don't know how lucky you are!

I see this as a good side. Maybe because there's not much a lot of information that will make you overwhelmed back then?

I often find myself learning or investigating how the system works behind the scene even if i did not write it.

I know the feeling. I always want to see whats going on behind the scenes.

Create GAMES not ENGINES.

Take Unity. Worry no more.

I don't think you know what that means.

I believe it means - code your games, once you realize that you have many features that you are using/reusing a lot. Make an engine around them.

its good to see someone who can see the deeper meaning of that. Most people just take it literally :D

1) You feel that it's cheating using other peoples code, you are awesome and you can create everything yourself
2) You start to make your own engine, you rewrite it 10 times because you don't like the code design
3) After the N-th rewrite you are finally more or less happy (in reality you are not happy, you want to rewrite it again, you can do it better, yes you can!)
4) Now it's time to create your game with your awesome engine, fuck third party shit thats for noobs!
5) You realize that for almost every new gameplay feature you want to add you need to write a entirely new part of the engine.
6) Eventually you create a simple prototype for your game and you realize that you hardly even wrote any gameplay code, you mostly just added engine functionality.
7) You realize that you wanted to write a game engine because you are actually interested in the low-level workings of a game engine and you start
to comprehend the amount of stuff needed for even the simplest thing.
8) You still want to make a game so you shamefully go to the unity or unreal engine site to look at their inferior engine compared to yours.
9) You realize that it's foolish to keep insisting on writing an engine and you start using unity/ue/... to make your game. The experience you get from rewritting your own
engine N-times is useful since you get the idea of how quickly large programs can become unmaintainable.
10) Hopefully you realize at this point it's unproductive to create a game engine for the sake of making a game, and you use unity/unreal engine/...
11) You start using unity/unreal engine/...
12) You stop working on your game because you lose motivation.

hahaha Amazing. You know whats going to happen. And yes most of them is going to happen. Some of them is happening currently.

have you been this path before? would be much better if you could share your experience :D

Excellent post, n3Xus

5) You realize that for almost every new gameplay feature you want to add you need to write a entirely new part of the engine.

Exactly. This is what "make games, not engines" means. Trying to anticipate everything you'll need just ends up making a bunch of wasted functionality.
Do the bare minimum to get stuff moving on the screen, and then write only what you actually need for this specific game.

6) Eventually you create a simple prototype for your game and you realize that you hardly even wrote any gameplay code, you mostly just added engine functionality.

Yep, this is another big one. Gameplay code is hard to envision, and under-taught compared to engine code. Small games like Pong/Tetris are easy, because everything just does what it does until some condition happens and the game is over. But in an adventure or RPG type game, you need some way of defining where enemies/interactable things are on maps, some way to control what gets spawned when, and how to control the game progression. A lot of the time it can feel pretty silly how simple it is... just place an object in front of a door, and when some variable is set, remove the object. But I would recommend starting early on this aspect of the game, to be sure that all the gameplay code you write can interact properly with the level data and game progression.

12) You stop working on your game because you lose motivation.

The nearly inevitable end to all amateur games Anticipate it, and prepare yourself emotionally to muscle through it. IME, games tend to go in this progression:
1) Yay! Everything is clean and new, the possibilities are endless!
2) It's starting to get cluttered and it doesn't really do anything yet.
3) Miserable, endless code. More and more and more, for months on end, and it just looks like a random collection of features, not a functioning game.
4) All the main features are more or less done. Running out of time. Bugs everywhere. Fix bugs. More bugs. Why does it still not look like a game?
5) Wait a second, it looks like a game now? It's done? Yay!
6) If you have any time left, go beyond simply making it function. Add little finishing touches to make it really special.

...and that's if you have other people making all the artwork/level design for you.