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Title. Middleware like unity or box2d which make automates and simplifies the entire process drastically.

Or do you encourage developers such as yourself to build their engine and/or tools from the ground up, essentially "reinventing the wheel"?

Considering that this whole forum is dedicated to a product which helps people NOT reinvent the wheel I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume we're cool with middleware. We even use box2d already.

I really like this post by kikito on this subject.

Yea I like using libraries. Makes it less annoying to code.

I'm like most with the bad habit to implement things on my own, but I don't do it on a whim, I do it more to understand my code. Meaning I follow Kikito's advice of spending time reading other implementations of specific things first.

In that regard, I'm actually of the opinion that cut-and-paste code should be more common. A library like [Penlight](https://github.com/stevedonovan/Penlight) is quite a big dependency to pull in, but it's full of useful code, and it's MIT licensed, so you should clip out the functions you need and gather them in your own util.lua. Don't steal though, include the copyright notice where necessary.