I think engines like Unreal and Unity confuse the whole thing, these often have a wide spread of skill levels - people can use the built in editors and scripting to do most things, but then advanced users can access low level features and shaders to make their projects more unique. I struggle to call things like Game Guru an engine, because you can't access low level features - I see them more as game creation systems when you don't have to step foot outside of its own IDE. I think the term engine has a fairly wide scope, it could mean the framework that handles everything but your game logic, or it could mean a system designed to make any sort of game... becomes difficult to make the distinction between a framework and an engine because it all depends on how you use it and your own abilities.
I think that AppGameKit can claim to be both a programming language (tier 1) and a framework (tier 2) - I can't call it an engine because it doesn't do a great deal for you really, you still need to make your own game environments and for the most part are left to your own devices. It's the way I prefer it, of course, otherwise I'd use Cryengine or something and get annoyed at everything because it eats up my time. Too many layers of abstraction are a distraction... silly bugs in editors, bad performance, having to work in the prescribed way... it eats up time and usually I'd much rather make editors for specific projects as I go. To me, using a standard engine like Cryengine or Unity just ends up in procrastination, worse than with languages and frameworks, because with something like AppGameKit, you know what is possible and how to do it (and if not, the community is always there) - in most other engines you're left relying on the standard toolset that they spent years perfecting to their own requirements without a whole lot of granularity, but with a fair dose of arrogance IMO.
Mostly, I use AppGameKit because its all within my comfort zone - I know what it can do and it makes my lofty project ideas actually possible, ideas that would take far too long in an engine like Unity. Solo developers need to be realistic, we can't see ourselves as entire teams of people... in my experience its better to keep everything simple and if your lucky enough to have someone who wants to help design levels for example, then they don't need to learn an IDE, just a specific editor for the project in hand. AppGameKit T1 lets me develop as organically as I know I shouldn't... using less familiar systems feels like someone is looking over my shoulder critisizing everything I do... hopefully that makes sense to someone
The code is dark and full of errors
