As I started using Unity I became more curious about the things I didnt know. I realize how little my knowledge is in terms of game development. I also realize that using an engine is the way to go. But the thing is, I started to have this hunger to know how do this people do this engine. I have this game in my mind and I am currently doing it. But I am getting side track by this thoughts about how things work. It seems that my interest keeps on changing but my goal is still the same. To make the game I had in mind. Right now I am thinking if I should buy the book about game engine. A moment ago I was searching about scene graph and other stuff which I shouldn't worry about since I am using Unity. Has anyone been like this before?

There is much to know, and much to learn. There is much material online you can learn from, but it is self-directed and you need to sift through what is most important at every phase of your learning. If you're looking for a dead-tree book on Unity there are several including the one linked to at the bottom of my post. Reviewed books tend to be better if you need guidance of what to learn next; if you don't know what you need to know next it can help get you to the level of basic competency.

As for what goes inside game engines, they are complex beasts. Consider that the major engines have been in development for years and tend to have large teams behind them. They typically represent several hundred work-years of effort by professionals, each person being expert in their own domains. As such, you could not create an engine like Unity or Unreal by yourself if you spent one hundred or five hundred years on it. They contain a huge number of systems: graphics processing, graphics file processing, graphics display, audio playback, audio formats, physics-based an non-physics based simulations, math and numerics libraries, disk libraries, animation libraries, UI libraries, networking support, and much more.

Has anyone been like this before?

Only once ..... continuously, for the past 35 years.

I often find new things I know nothing about, and I solve that by reading about it at the Internet, or from a book. Pondering how I would build it, also tends to work.

I also find things I want to try. Usually I manage to delay that until a good excuse comes along to spend time on it :)

The world is full with wonderful, weird, good, and bad stuff. No way anyone is going to know it all, but it sure is fun exploring random subjects. I also had the experience that I invented a solution, which I found later, already existed. It's always nice to see that other people reach the same conclusion as you did, albeit lots of years earlier :)

PURSUE YOUR INTERESTS!

PURSUE YOUR INTERESTS!

My interest is conflicting with my goal really. That's my I am more confuse

This thing about being sidetracked happens to me with such strength and frequency that I follow a depth first tree-traversal algorithm and never get shit done. It's to the point that I just had to know how to code a simple win32 that just opens a window in pure assembly. Pure means none of that HLA thing with "invoke" or if-else blocks. It's push the args on the stack and call. It's compare EAX to some value and branch on condition.

It's VERY good that you want to know how things work. This is where most of my motivation towards programming comes from.

It's OK for the interest to conflict, as long as you know which one you should prioritize. You can get a book and read a chapter a day while working on your main project most of the time, for example.

You should probably figure out what you really want to do. I tried Unity for about 6 months. It's awesome, but I discovered it's not really for me, not as my primary focus anyway. I found myself buying not only art assets but a lot of code as well. With my previous experience I was able to debug the code I was buying and make it work correctly. I was certainly understanding it. But I quickly came to miss the low level understanding of things. And I was buying more than I was learning. I missed the learning.

For me personally, I need to know things from beginning to end and build my own engine. Part of what I truly love about this is discovering the deep mysteries of this stuff. I went from DX11 to Unity and I found that I missed doing things from scratch and the discovery of the low level processes. My goal is not to finish a game, not in the near future, and not until I'm ready. Instead it is to understand how it all works and develop my ability with the craft.

So, I'm doing C++ and OpenGL now. I wouldn't hesitate to write a prototype with Unity or test something in Unity. But I love coding it from scratch and learning how to code it from scratch. This is not the right path for everyone; in fact, it's probably not the right path for most people. But it's the right path for me.

Maybe give OpenGL a try. Maybe you'll find it's not for you. Maybe you'll go back to Unity. Maybe you'll do something else instead. But at least you'll know more about what is right for you.

http://learnopengl.com/

You should probably figure out what you really want to do

I tried some frameworks in order:

XNA -> SFML -> Opengl (I used the website you linked) ->Monogame -> Unity

I guess I could summarize my confusion like this:

When I was using XNA, it was always exciting as I always learn something new especially browsing some source code. It was great and fun. Especially when I started opengl, since this is where I realize how things work using the website you gave, but even this is just scratching the surface. But then my mind started to change again, like many aspiring game devs they all wanna work at some big studios, so am I. So there is this doubt that even I am able to learn the low level stuff, it is the result that people are looking for. and basically working on an engine alone is such a very time consuming task. Then I started using Unity. 1st month I was having fun. ITs easy. All you gotta do is think about ideas and then plan the things you gotta do. But then I started to missed the low level stuff. the unknown things you discover and say "aaaahhh so this is how it works". So I guess I am on the same boat as you. I maybe missing the excitement. The kind of self achievement thing. Or maybe I am just bored. I don't know.

PURSUE YOUR INTERESTS!

My interest is conflicting with my goal really. That's my I am more confuse

No it isn’t.

I started off writing games.
While writing games, I was always interested in “how this worked”. So I made games while working on a miniature framework of my own, and sometimes did mundane tasks such as reimplementing strcpy() or anything I was inspired to do. While also making games.

Eventually at my smaller company I was writing more and more low-level code while others took over the game-code side of things.

Then I joined tri-Ace where I worked exclusively on their in-house engine, followed by Square Enix where I worked on the Luminous Studio engine for Final Fantasy XV. Followed by working on CryEngine.

But I have always been wondering “how this works,” and am currently interviewing at Apple to work on their Metal and OpenGL drivers. Even more low-level than engines.

Not only has there never been a conflict, it is exactly the mentality that has propelled my career through to where it is now, 5 countries later.
You don’t just make one or the other. You can always work on them together, either in a single project or separately. I am working on my own engine now, while also working on a new version of MHS (disassembler, assembler, hex editor, very low-level, part of my discovery of how things work), an NES emulator (again, part of my low-level pursuit of how things work), and an actual game. You drift fluidly from one thing to the next, not just give up one and go to the other. Work on your game, and work on your own game engine. Simple.

Never stop exploring and never “give in” to something less interesting just because there is some bat-shit crazy stigma about “making games, not engines”.
It is up to you what you make. Just do what you want and keep your life interesting. And maybe you will naturally fall into a lengthy career at big-name places doing the hardest funnest work for the highest salary.


L. Spiro