I always have a slight regret for not making my own engine for Cloak and Dasher. I use Unity, but I coded about 98% of it myself. I even ended up writing my own UI layer on top of theirs since I didn’t like their controller support. It probably would have made things a lot faster and smoother if I didn’t keep fighting the engine to get what I want.

I’m currently working on my own engine in Rust. It’s focused on future games I want to do, so it’s not going to be something universal. It’s not my first attempt, though I used mostly 3rd party engines in the past (Unity, Godot). But they always make it difficult to make things the way I want, I’m tired with them.

I tried making my own game map out of just php and divs once, mostly out of nostalgia for Neopets. Then I wisely decided javascript would be a million times better.
I then experimented with making characters move around on a divs based map instead of canvas. It was… okay. Probably not optimal.