i am creating a game similar to this.

[Spooder Wekd]

@Spooder Wekd:
Sorry for the misunderstanding, but to me your first post seemed more like "you don't know that so you shouldn't be making games".
I agree with everything you said in your second post, though, except that I still think using a third-party engine is the only way a lot of people will actually finish a game. Although I wouldn't say "never write your own engine when there's so many good free ones around" (I heard that quite a few times, though), I'd still advise people looking to make games to have a good look at their options.

It's all good. the reason I encourage writing your own engine is because I don't like dealing with other programmer's code. It is often hard to figure out how an engine works. Hence this thread even existing. If he had made his own engine he would know everything it can do, and there would be no unnecessary bloat caused by unused features. Also, engines can make games feel generic, because people use the shallow and easily accessible features to make games that feel more like mods than actual games. This is a problem with the over used UDK on indieDB...Sorry if I repeated a lot from my first post, I didn't go back and re-read it to see what I actually said!