Game Engine Design - A Free-For-All

If you Google "game engine design best practices" or "game engine design techniques," you get a real melange of results, few of which provide much immediate value outside the satisfaction of personal curiosity, on the off chance that you are curious about the design of a particular game engine.  Since the engine I'm building / have built is my first one (well, probably third or fourth, but first to progress to the point of actually being able to run a game) I'm no expert on the subject, but I've learned enough to find that a game engine is a very single purpose beast.

This singularity of purpose leads to the lack of "best practice" in the domain.  While I'm sure if I took a series of classes on game design and game engine design I would be fed some "best practices," or at least, design patterns, the creation of a cookie cutter game engine, while theoretically possible, would be such a boondoggle it would rival if not trump the practice of low-level-design in traditional software programming.

Simply put, what works for Final Fantasy is not going to work for Angry Birds, and the effort of trying to make a one size fits all game engine, and coding to the engine, would be considerably greater than coding two game engines. Since I write all this as a personal opinion from the perspective of someone who has minimal experience in the field of game development,  I will be providing no hard evidence to support my rambling, so take my statements for what you will, however the direct correlation between the complexity of usage of a framework / engine and the level of flexibility afforded by said framework / engine has been demonstrated time and again (and I'm sure if you enter a magic series of keywords into Google you'll find some evidence to that effect).

And now for something actually interesting, another demo sprite.  Enjoy

a Panda, standing, in a v-neck