Nostalgic Development Practices: Fantasy Consoles and DIY Game Engines

This paper examines a growing movement among game developers who reject readymade engines such as Unity and Unreal in favor of custom-built engines or "fantasy consoles" that impose deliberate technical constraints. Using a combination of archival and textual analysis alongside critical making, the author centers the case of Billy Basso, whose homebrew engine for Animal Well (2024) was framed by critics and the developer himself as central to the game's success. The study situates this practice within a broader cultural pattern in which developers, including those behind Factorio, Teardown, and Sokoban, use bespoke tooling as evidence of technical skill, intentional design, and artistic uniqueness.

The analysis identifies a communicative strategy in which developers emphasize low-level concerns such as memory management and asset packing as forms of deep, critical knowledge. This emphasis draws on masculine traditions of technical exchange within gear and tool culture, while simultaneously positioning users of readymade engines as lacking rigor. Such developers often describe off-the-shelf engines as limiting creativity, even as they depend on the same technical discourse that makes their own work legible to audiences.

The paper also contrasts this handmade-engine approach with fantasy consoles like the PICO-8, which impose retro-inspired constraints such as a 128x128 display and limited palettes, and rely on the high-level scripting language Lua. These platforms cultivate accessible, forum-based, and anticorporate communities, and treat game development itself as a playful system. Across both approaches, developers center intimate knowledge of machines, though their politics diverge: one valorizes exclusionary technical competence, while the other fosters open, exploratory play.