As someone who developed a 3D game engine from scratch, you may want to listen to what I have to say.

If your goal is to learn what makes a game engine tick, then go ahead and develop an engine. It is the best thing you can do. I guarantee you that you will become an expert in computer graphics, OpenGL, Linear Algebra, and computational geometry algorithms.

However, developing a game engine is an INSANELY complicated task. It took me about four years to develop the basic framework of the engine. That's right. Just to develop the basic framework of a 3D game engine took that long. By "Basic" I mean that the engine has a collision detection system, a physics engine, rendering engine, animation system, a Digital Asset importer, etc.

To test the features of the engine, I decided to develop a full blown soccer game. It is still a work in progress. Here is a video of the latest game update:

Here is another video that showcases what the engine can currently do:

And here is one of the very first demos showcasing the basic framework:

All in all, it has taken me about four years to develop the engine. However, the engine is not complete yet. There are bugs and issues with it. As I work on the soccer game, I'm finding more and more issues.

An engine requires a lot of maintenance and time; time that could be better spent developing your game instead. Thus, if you just want to develop a game, use an existing game engine instead.

You may be curious how a game engine works. If that is the case, I wrote several articles on game engine development that should give you a pretty good idea how it works.

How does a game engine works?

How does a rendering engine works?

How does a physics engine works?

And if you are interested, you can get a copy of my eBook: Components of a Game Engine

Enjoy