Light on Glass: Why do you start making a game engine?

Summary

In my last post I wrote about how Retro Game Engine started. It was not some grand “engine initiative,” but as a stubborn little D3D12 + Win32 prototype that slowly turned into a full pipeline. This post is the other half of that story. We covered the “how”. Now I want to dive into the “why”. If I’m being honest, I didn’t build RetroEngine out of a desire to reinvent the wheel. I built it because, once I reconnected with a real CRT, I couldn’t u nsee what modern engines were doing to the image…not out of incompetence, but out of design.Modern engines are incredible. I’ve used Unreal and Unity for close to a decade. I love them. This isn’t a dunk piece meant to say my engine is any better or even close to those. I’m not insane or naïve. Those engines are like a multi-purpose tool. You can do so much with them. Retro Game Engine is more like a Philips screwdriver. Its a tool with one purpose. At then end of this though, if I succeed, it will do its job better than any multi-purpose tool could. Lets set the stage, so to speak. The spark that ignited this entire endeavor wasn’t some recent binge where I was obsessively tuning scanline sliders in unreal at 2am (it would be fair to think that was the case). Nah this wasn’t present momentum leading to a trigger point…it was hindsight. For years I had seen CRT filters, built advanced post-process materials, and watched other people do the same. They looked cool, they scratched the itch in a way. They always seemed good enough when I compared them against the mental image from my childhood memories. I assumed any gap was pure nostalgia, not anything tangible.The day that changed was the day I dragged home a $35 Sharp CRT from 1998, plugged in an old console (SNES), and actually started playing. I was immediately hit by a wave of experiences that are hard to articulate. In short, it was magic.Motion didn’t look like a clean sequence of frozen frames played in rapid repetition. Bright objects didn’t just glow, they behaved lik...