Yeah, I repeated that as a mantra when I was first learning to program and trying to make games. We all did, it was a common meme of our local game development scene.
And it's utter and complete nonsense. If what you want is to make a game, then these tools aren't half as bad, and at the level of simple games, unless you have some really novel mechanic, you're quite literally wasting time and effort coding it instead of using a game builder.
What drove this point home to me after more than a decade were two situations.
1) on a global game jam, the artist in our team got fed up waiting for us programmers after 3 or 4 hours, and did the prototype we're trying to build in 15 minutes flat, using Construct 2.
2) you too may be surprised to discover that some of the fun and highly acclaimed titles like Cook Serve Delicious or Nuclear Throne were made in Game Maker. I didn't even suspect it until I found it on-line (in the former case, because sources were available in Humble Bundle's Game Maker bundle).
There's value in hand-coding a game, and this is what I still like to do in simple cases, but it's often not the practical option. And if a game maker allows you to add custom code, then really there's no difference between this and Unity or Unreal Engine.
Also, a lot of professional game developers seem to have gotten started with Game Maker as children. One example that comes to mind is Matt Thorsen, creator of Celeste.
And it's utter and complete nonsense. If what you want is to make a game, then these tools aren't half as bad, and at the level of simple games, unless you have some really novel mechanic, you're quite literally wasting time and effort coding it instead of using a game builder.
What drove this point home to me after more than a decade were two situations.
1) on a global game jam, the artist in our team got fed up waiting for us programmers after 3 or 4 hours, and did the prototype we're trying to build in 15 minutes flat, using Construct 2.
2) you too may be surprised to discover that some of the fun and highly acclaimed titles like Cook Serve Delicious or Nuclear Throne were made in Game Maker. I didn't even suspect it until I found it on-line (in the former case, because sources were available in Humble Bundle's Game Maker bundle).
There's value in hand-coding a game, and this is what I still like to do in simple cases, but it's often not the practical option. And if a game maker allows you to add custom code, then really there's no difference between this and Unity or Unreal Engine.