My experience with making your own engine vs using an off the shelf solution - the former can be viable and even superior
on the condition that you know what you're doing. That is if you've built entire games or engines before, or have enough experience with the internals of one.
Otherwise it can be a dangerous fool's errand on which many projects go to die. My younger naive self can attest to this, he loved trying to build his own overly-ambitious engines. But he never finished any games.
Another thought if you do roll your own - keep it simple stupid. When your brain tells you that some amazing nested scene graph with integrated occlusion culling would be the coolest thing in the world, but you lack evidence that you'll actually need all that functionality, tell your brain that it's being stupid and just implement some kind of basic flat scene structure. You can always retrofit it later.
Also - study the code of the likes of Carmack. Consider that he produced the likes of the quake engines in only a couple of years. Reflect long and hard on the raw simplicity of a lot of that code.
Do not worship complexity.
These are the words of someone who has walked both roads!
Otherwise it can be a dangerous fool's errand on which many projects go to die. My younger naive self can attest to this, he loved trying to build his own overly-ambitious engines. But he never finished any games.
Another thought if you do roll your own - keep it simple stupid. When your brain tells you that some amazing nested scene graph with integrated occlusion culling would be the coolest thing in the world, but you lack evidence that you'll actually need all that functionality, tell your brain that it's being stupid and just implement some kind of basic flat scene structure. You can always retrofit it later.
Also - study the code of the likes of Carmack. Consider that he produced the likes of the quake engines in only a couple of years. Reflect long and hard on the raw simplicity of a lot of that code.
Do not worship complexity.
These are the words of someone who has walked both roads!