Learning by using tools against their intended purpose
Does this make sense?
Back in school, I was amazed by teachers' ideas for what tasks to give students.
Today, I look at it a little differently, but back then, the task of making a business card in Microsoft Word was inherently absurd! Especially given I knew that dedicated applications for such tasks existed.
These days, I think of them differently. They’re like… flying a tank:
You can still find equally absurd tasks, e.g. making a database in a spreadsheet! It can be done, but it's not necessarily a good idea, yet many will still do it.
Although it's not a good long-term solution, doing it still makes sense. When you're learning!
You can learn a lot about a tool when you try to use it against its intended purpose. Namely, you quickly discover its limitations.
Knowing what not to do is the key to productivity, avoiding tasks and projects that are harder (or even impossible) to implement in favor of those that can be done more quickly.
But can this be applied to game engines?
Even making desktop applications doesn't seem so absurd, does it?
Do you have any ideas?
I'd say that if someone is learning, this makes sense. But in execution stages, it may create problems.
This idea has merit, but there a slight asterisk with that. I noticed that in one of my previous companies.
It works, but only if you are doing these 2 things:
- You know better (i.e. you know several different tools that can achieve the same result and you experiment till you find the best approach)
- You are not getting attached to the things that you are using
I have seen so many times now how people use the least efficient approaches to do something just because "this is how it always was", spending hours upon hours on software that doesn't even make sense for this particular task. Game engines included. Some companies spend millions of dollars to develop something with their custom engines that comes out of the box with Unity / Unreal and then scrap for funding the actual game. The list can go on for a while.
When you get comfortable with using a tool against its intended purpose is the time when you stop growing.