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a thing that makes game engines interesting is that the best engine for a game is one made exactly for it, but the best engine for prototyping and experimenting with a game is one that assumes as little as possible about it.

it feels like there are big game engines that make very few assumptions (unity, unreal, godot) and ones that make many large assumptions (rpg maker, adventure game studio, renpy) but it really feels like for me the sweet spot is in the middle and has little representation

maybe somewhat surprising people: i think ECS engines might eventually be the way to accomplish this. but what i am envisioning and how i am envisioning a dev working with them is likely not what your experience using an existing one has been

a lot of (even my own) ECS criticism comes down to how difficult prototyping and iterating can be, how because of their architectural and code-first nature, the experimental phase of development is handicapped

but unlike many versions of this critic i see, i can imagine ECS overcoming this hurdle. an engine we could play with and experiment with game ideas quickly and iteratively, but was always in a state of stable, organized, error-proof, and optimal code

what about pico8 type fantasy consoles; with heavy limitations but still ability to make many game types

in this case the code and level editor is very limited, but the visual capabilities and style is more restricted (for comfortable use), so it doesn’t sit in the middle but rather kind of straddles the line in an interesting way. this kind of engine is also cool and i’d like to see more of