Just because the industry is used to creating a piece of art with just a stamp book (and stamp books are the hot thing right now), doesn't mean its the only way to create art. If you truly think that "we've done it, we've come up with everything we need to make games using these engines!" you lack serious creativity! If you want to LEAD the industry and not just follow it, you're going to have to step out of that comfort zone.

Not every game needs to be ANOTHER open world adventure game with crafting, an overhead camera, dialogue scenes, and click and hold menu buttons.

In the end, creating games at lower levels might inspire you to actually create something unique.

The same problem occurs in the music industry as well. Why even compose music when garage band offers audio clips you can just re-organize and loop in cool ways? Why use mics to record sound when there are plenty of already professionally recorded midi plugins for you to use?

My answer to you is creativity. Try doing something more natural and you might just create something fascinating, something nobody expected, something actually unique. Not only that, but you will be able to more fluently communicate your ideas to your audience, tweaking things exactly as you mean them to be. Not limiting yourself to the buttons and inputs in some interface.

There's always tradeoffs. These generic tools are made generic to reach the biggest audiences. But by being generic, they sacrifice the ability to be more specific, or else they become so much more abstract that they are harder to use than just writing something yourself.

With that mindset, I'm really curious on how you view the industry trend in AI tools. Obviously its hit the art industry sooner, but there's more and more tools for game developers coming out now too.

If you think the way you do about game engines and javascript, then if someone uses AI to generate a game by typing a paragraph about their game, do you really still see them as a game developer? Maybe that term isn't as important to you, but I'm willing to bet you would agree that artists would find it highly offensive if people who generate art using AI call themselves artists with as much authority as those who have disciplined themselves in the field for countless years.

And that's avoiding the fact that with higher and higher level abstractions that people know what's even going on at all. Bro, have you tried debugging modern javascript frameworks? What a nightmare...The call stack dump alone is like 3 full pages of shit that nobody knows how it works, all built on shit that also nobody knows how it works. Absolute nightmare. Oh, but don't worry! Someone will build yet another stack of technology on top of that to give it a Band-Aid! Yikes.

some gates need to be kept. if you use an LLM to generate a game for you, are you still a "game developer"? where does one draw the line? it's has to be somewhere, and

"understands what a 'game engine' necessarily entails such that 'making a simple single-threaded 2D platformer "from scratch (using libraries)" in C or equivalent' isn't a scary thing, but rather very, very simple and straightforward"

seems about as good of a bar as any—and it's a very, very low bar, one that anyone who is offended that they don't meet this criteria, should be able to achieve in two weekends, tops. then you can go back to using whatever general-purpose engine you want, secure in your improved knowledge about how games can made without using one.

you seem to think that my 2D platformer example is some outrageously difficult task, too scary for you to make, which is exactly what I'm talking about—you should intuitively understand how little I'm actually asking for here, instead of being outraged at my suggestion.