It's really a talk of concepts. If you wanted something that teaches you how to program game engines with actual code then you'll want to look at this.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0122290631?keywords=game%20engine%20design&qid=1456118975&ref_=sr_1_3&sr=8-3

It's dated now, but I have this tome on my shelf. It's not perfect, and I dunno how much of its design decisions make sense a decade later, but it is interesting for walking through building a whole game engine.

I wish there was an updated edition, or something analogous, but modern.

Still sounds to me you just want to start making games. If that is the case I would really not bother with a engine unless you have tons of experience coding. Coding a proper engine requires a huge skill set, I have been coding games for a view years and would not even know where to start making an engine. And everyone in the game industry would agree with "make games, not engines" unless you are really interested in these lower level things and then you can go down all the way to binary and assembly language and never ever create a game.

Make games not engines

Engines are popping out like mushrooms these days so if you want to start making games then all you need to do is pick one. The most popular ones have tutorials that will let your create things in a matter of hours you would never ever expect to create in a lifetime. You will get inspired by these tutorials and start thinking how you could use the things you learned in that game concept you have in your mind. You can literally finish these tutorials in a couple of hours with some coding experience and end up with a great functioning game. Then alter the settings and gameplay a bit, create some art of your own for it and upload it to the Play Store and your friends will be like "WTF!?".

Unity & Unreal Engine

So yeah, if you want to make games pick a engine or framework. The best two engines currently out there (and this is partially opinion based) are Unity and Unreal Editor 4. Unity required coding but you can pick anything from Java, C#, C++ and who knows what they added in the last view years. Unreal Editor has some sort of revolutionary "blueprint" coding. Where you can drag and drop tiny premade scripts into a window and hook them up by dragging. For huge algorithms I can imagine this to be a pain in the ass to manage but this allows you to create awesome games without every typing a line of code. You can however use C++ with unreal engine but C++ is rather hard to learn vs higher level languages. Unreal Engine wins on visual effects from every other engine I have seen so far, but haven't looked at that many lately. Both are 100% free until you earn enough to make a living out of it so no need to worry about funds for the near future.

But I really want to role my own engine

You might however have your reasons to create your own engine but unless you are going to create the next AAA+ title or want to learn about it I think you should not. I cannot really help you with creating a engine since I have never tried but I can tell you that if you are not 100% comfortable in a language (and preferably C++ since you want to squeeze every bit of power out of your engine) start to get 100% comfortable with it. For example, you need to know everything about design patterns and make good use of these. Then start learning about entity/component systems, this will make your efforts versatile. When you nailed both your chosen language and component design you might be able to pull it off, in the meantime you can find other people with the common interest of making engines and share knowledge about it.

Forgot to mention: my goal would be to make a game, if possible with a game engine (made on my own), in a few months

As others have said before me:

1. Decide what you want to do, games or engines, and concentrate on that.

2. Make it years instead of months. Given you have no prior expierience, you will not get very far in months. You might be able to have finished your first few pong and pacman clones in that timeframe. Thats about it.

Depends on how much time you are able to invest of course. But as a rule of thumb, calculate with about 3 years to become competent enough in game programming to be able to start developing a more or less modern 3D game. Might be 5 years if you deviate a lot or have not much time, or 2 years if you invest a lot of time.

3. For small games, going without an engine is an option, and a good one at that (less overhead, more control)... for anything more it is advisable to use a game engine.

And provided you don't want to become an engine programmer to work in big studios or with engine developers like Epic or Unity, and you want to learn to create engines for learning purposes, creating your engine is a rather futile task.

Its better to pick an existing one up as soon as you are ready for it (modern 3D engines have pretty steep learning curves), and concentrate on creating your game instead of low level plumbing to get your engine running.

Best bets for 3D engines are Unity 5 or Unreal Engine 4 at the moment. For 2D, its probably Gamemaker.

Actually nevermind: Game Coding Complete's source codes don't compile under Win10 / VS2015...

I got it to work on VS2015 last year.

How? I don't want to read both the book and the changes that have to be made in order to get it to work.. but your project works, thank you!

It's dated now, but I have this tome on my shelf. It's not perfect, and I dunno how much of its design decisions make sense a decade later, but it is interesting for walking through building a whole game engine.

I wish there was an updated edition, or something analogous, but modern.

The promised content is really appealing; but some reviews say it's plenty of bugs. If it was more recent, it'd be easier to find a solution to non-working lines of codes, but that is so long ago.. does it use OpenGL, DirectX or others?

1. Decide what you want to do, games or engines, and concentrate on that.

Then it's going to be: game. I won't use any game engine though, I'll just hard code it myself with calls to OpenGL maybe. It doesn't have to be awesome, just a player doing some stuff around

The promised content is really appealing; but some reviews say it's plenty of bugs. If it was more recent, it'd be easier to find a solution to non-working lines of codes, but that is so long ago.. does it use OpenGL, DirectX or others?

I think the intent was to present an engine that could be done in either OpenGL or DirectX, but the implementation is all Direct3D. It's older code, but it's still Direct3D 9, so it's not as full of deprecated mess as it might be. Probably worth a flier if you can find a cheap second-hand copy.

The promised content is really appealing; but some reviews say it's plenty of bugs. If it was more recent, it'd be easier to find a solution to non-working lines of codes, but that is so long ago.. does it use OpenGL, DirectX or others?

I think the intent was to present an engine that could be done in either OpenGL or DirectX, but the implementation is all Direct3D. It's older code, but it's still Direct3D 9, so it's not as full of deprecated mess as it might be. Probably worth a flier if you can find a cheap second-hand copy.

DirectX9 seems old, but many books still use it and it's still widely implemented, so that wouldn't be a problem. Unluckily, I can't find a cheap copy; the only one is on Amazon for ~$10, but I'm not American and they don't ship to Europe (and the cheapest after that would cost like a new one if shipped).

How? I don't want to read both the book and the changes that have to be made in order to get it to work.. but your project works, thank you!

This isn't directly relevant, but I've actually found that doing this sort of exercise can teach me much more than copying sure-fire code from a book or the internet into my project (I'm not saying that it's not still nice to be able to do that, though).

Actually nevermind: Game Coding Complete's source codes don't compile under Win10 / VS2015...

I got it to work on VS2015 last year.

How? I don't want to read both the book and the changes that have to be made in order to get it to work.. but your project works, thank you!

You can read the book as-is. The code is largely untouched, the "conversion" consisted mostly of rebuilding the relevant libraries.

How? I don't want to read both the book and the changes that have to be made in order to get it to work.. but your project works, thank you!

This isn't directly relevant, but I've actually found that doing this sort of exercise can teach me much more than copying sure-fire code from a book or the internet into my project (I'm not saying that it's not still nice to be able to do that, though).

Debugging code supposed to be correct isn't ideal, especially because I'm new to this ;)

Actually nevermind: Game Coding Complete's source codes don't compile under Win10 / VS2015...

I got it to work on VS2015 last year.

How? I don't want to read both the book and the changes that have to be made in order to get it to work.. but your project works, thank you!

You can read the book as-is. The code is largely untouched, the "conversion" consisted mostly of rebuilding the relevant libraries.

Nice! So I can just grab a copy of it, study it while using your libraries and I should be fine, right?