Fabien Sanglard

You'd be committing the classic fallacy of "i'll just work on these tools, then make the game", which while a fun exercise, almost never results in a game being released.

Think about what your ultimate goal is:

- you want to make games: use an existing engine. don't bother with half of the features, focus on whether the game is fun or not. add polish (like character animation transitions) later. use stock assets to begin with.

- you want knowledge to work in games industry but not actually release a game yourself: learn all the bells and whistles of Unreal Engine

- you want to make things that are unlike regular games: develop your own code

- you don't ever intend to release a game, you just want to see how they're made: just read other people's code. Read the Quake engine source code and https://fabiensanglard.net/ as a companion site.

If you're talking about using raylib, that is also a game engine, just a simpler one. We can look in both directions; if this is an exercise exclusively for personal learning and development, why not also learn about what's done for you by that library and by the GPU, etc? Occlusion, rasterisation, depth buffering, perspective-correct texture mapping...

"the number one most important skill is how to keep a tangle of features from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity" https://prog21.dadgum.com/177.html

this is what game engines do - they abstract the essential complexity present in all games, and keep it from infecting the…

The biggest thing is lower resolution. 640x480 at 256 colors was a high-color, high-resolution mode at the time.

Small bitmaps, with indexed palettes and run-length-encoding to further shrink them.

Caches were tiny, memory was slower, hard disks massively slower, and if you had to hit a CD to load data, forget about it. So packing data was important, and organizing data for cache locality, and writing algorithms to take advantage of instruction pipelining and avoid branches.

Fabian Sanglard has a great blog that goes into the nitty gritty of a lot of these techniques as used in different games.

https://fabiensanglard.net/

I had a Cyrix 6x86 when Quake first came out. My disappointment at how poorly Quake ran on it was significant, especially because pretty much every other game at the time ran well on the Cyrix. The FPU performance in Quake was doubly handicapped on the Cyrix: not only was its FPU slower than the Pentium's to begin with, Quake's code was indeed hand-optimized for the Pentium's FPU pipeline. Fabien Sanglard's writeup of Michael Abrash's optimizations for Quake goes into great detail: https://fabiensanglard.net/quake_asm_optimizations/