Why I ditched Unity for pure C#

After building several game prototypes in Unity, I found myself fighting the engine more than building actual game logic. Too much magic. Too many abstractions I didn't understand.

So I stripped everything back. No engine. Just C#, a window, and a game loop.

What I learned changes how you write code

The first realization: you don't need a physics engine for most games. A simple AABB collision check handles 90% of 2D game physics. The moment I wrote that myself, I finally understood it.

The second: state machines are everything. Player states, enemy AI, menu transitions — all state machines. Once I had a clean FSM implementation, complex game behavior became trivial.

The third: your game loop IS your engine. Fixed timestep, delta time, input polling — get that right and everything else is just logic on top.

Should you try it?

Yes. If you're learning game dev, build one game without an engine first. You'll learn more in two weeks than in months of Unity tutorials.