In his latest blog post, Noel Berry breaks down why he prefers rolling his own engines over using commercial game engines for his projects, as well as how you can approach doing so yourself.

I genuinely believe making games without a big “do everything” engine can be easier, more fun, and often less overhead.

Games he’s worked on, such as Celeste, Celeste 64, and his upcoming release with his brother Liam, City of None, are all built on top of open-source libraries. The latter two use his open-source engine Foster, which he describes as “my own C# layer”.

Later in the article, he mentions how having control over his engine allowed him to implement handy features like hot reloading, live-inspection tools, and custom asset pipelines.

P.S. Congrats on 20 years of game development Noel!