The pattern for making an engine - which is also where the best engines used by various game studios came from - is to follow this pattern:

1. Make a game. Don't worry about “engine”.
2. When the game is done, figure out your second game.
3. Make a second game, stripping out what you didn't need in the first game and adding what you need in the second game.
4. When the second game is done, figure out what you need for the third game.
5. Make a third game, stripping out what you didn't need and adding what you need in the third game.
6. At this point, the stuff you've built for the first three games is your engine.

This is actually where many of the big engines came from. Unreal Engine came from a game called Fire Fight, followed up by a game Unreal, followed up by Unreal Tournament, which was then shared as an engine called the Unreal Engine. C4 Engine (which is not as popular because it isn't free) grew out of Terathon and games that were published through Sierra and Sony, eventually becoming a licensed engine. Many studios were bought by companies like EA, Activision, Ubisoft, etc., in part to acquire their engine technologies that they had developed with a series of smaller successful games.

Over the years I've worked on various company-internal engines, Lightbright, Glycerin, Slipspace, Quake\GoldSrc, etc, that evolved from the studio developing game after game.

@frob Thank you for the Information!

This is a reply to a previous question, so i forgot to quote, anyway this is why I stay away from steam

I need a pubblisher becasue :

1. Don't know s**** about marketing
2. I need another c++ coder
3. I need a 3d graphics artist , my current 3d models are both bought or heavily modified after being download from somewher

So my intention is to seek some kind of angel investor who is willing to put some money to pay these professional figures.

+1 on Game Engine Architecture, by Jason Gregory. I use(d) it as a guideline throughout the development of my current game engine.

Programmer71 said:

A couple of months ago I presented my game t a pubblisher, since I did not use any engine , their answer was : "we cannot pubblish a game running on an engine mantained only by one person, if you had used UNITY , our answer would have been different". After that day I was obsessed with UINTY to the point I became a UNITY-MAN ( from now on UNI_MAN ) , so now i cannot think anythign else other than UNITY

I personally work with C++ and OpenGL. My own experience with Unity is quite limited. However, I have some major concerns about this game engine, which were confirmed after watching the following video. . .

hmmm…

After watching this, i realize… it's no longer easy nowadays to say ‘gamedev is hard’, and then hoping people might eventually believe me.

So we just have to accept, order of reputation goes like this: Firefighter > doctor > streamer > youtuber > poltican > gamedev. :/

JoeJ said:

hmmm…

After watching this, i realize… it's no longer easy nowadays to say ‘gamedev is hard’, and then hoping people might eventually believe me.

So we just have to accept, order of reputation goes like this: Firefighter > doctor > streamer > youtuber > poltican > gamedev. :/

Exactly!

Programmer71 said:
now we have UNITY ,the dream made reality

And so game development degrades to content creation.

But maybe that's to your advantage. After enough such clueless content creators claim that Unity does not work, publishers may change their mind about custom engines made by proper devs.

Our time will come… :D