Comment to ook discussion: could Angband be considered as ‘game engine’?
I played for years in TomeNET which is based at very old version of MAngband (which is based at ancient version of Angband), and it didn’t had ‘game engine’ component in it. Modern Angband is very different!
Considering ‘configuration’ aspect:
In contrast to ‘regular’ graphic-based games (eg modern RRG genre), roguelike genre ‘game engine’ is supposed to be configuration based. As the foundation of the roguelike game is to ‘assemble’ RNG dungeons, put there random objects and give player to deal with them – and it’s all depends on certain formulas and constants. When we change such parameters in configuration – we change the most important part of the game; actually roguelike game could be considered as a ‘mathematical model’.
Thats why current Angband gamedata configuration provide loads times more possibilities in game design than any existent _default_ (out-of-box) ‘modern RPG’ game engine, like Unity etc. of course, this fact mainly based at roguelikish RNG-based gamedesign, but still 🙂
And of course to implement some unusual staff you have to code.. But anyway right now you could do AMAZING things with current ‘game engine’ 😀 I enjoy working with it!