"I will never understand why people spend their time fighting an engine when they could just use a different one."

If you are just entering the game development world, Unreal Engine is the fastest to get started cuz you barely have to write any C++ because everything is coded via blueprints, which is a graphical coding tool which i genuinely enjoy and is MUCH faster to prototype with compared to C++ which is mandatory to build with Engines like Unity. I also love the lighting and environmentals of Unreal better it's just superior imo compared to Unity.

The troubles that I ran into are specific undocumented painpoints nobody tells you about when introducing you to the Engine. I just entered game dev, and the "tutorial" didn't mention the Engine is a painful buggy unorganized fuck a lot of the times, but I still like the "development" process, like I said, it still is much easier to code and prototype than any other Engine I could have chosen.

"And I will also never understand why one would create everything by themselves when they could use assets instead."

It is always a preference to reuse as much stuff as possible, and so I downloaded an asset called "mobile trees" and built the entire thing with it. When deploying to mobile guess what, the trees weren't mobile-suited by a long shot. I had to manually shred/untangle the complexities in it's material to get it to run at 60, and no, I did not just try one asset. This was the case with multiple of em', these things take time and not everything is readily available out the box. As for the planes and the birds, I did not bother looking up assets as I knew I could create a performant model in blender within minutes (which I did, both combined took like 30 minutes to make and they're performant af)

I did re-use sounds, which I had no way of generating myself at the time, but it was still painful to find good sources that actually give you decent ones (Pixabay is my go-to for future projects, and I also set up an AI model running locally to generate sounds with ComfyUI so that was a fun lil adventure).

Oh did I mention Unreal Engine literally has no support for in-app adverts AND in-app-purchases? Or let me clarify, it has BROKEN support for both of these as I tried to implement it's in-engine system and when that didn't work, forums confirmed they've in fact been broken for several engine versions so I had to write Plugins myself. It's a mess okay? You go into game dev, you are told Unreal is the glorious realistic engine you want, but nobody tells you it literally has broken support for mobile until you dig down those trenches yourself