We're king of derailing the thread (I hope we didn't scare off the OP!). But deciding if you are going to use a library or a framework, etc is a pretty personal decision. It really depends on what you want to do -- especially if you are building something for yourself. While "Not invented here" syndrome is a real thing, in the past decade or so, I feel like the industry is going in the opposite direction. There is a feeling that you *shouldn't* write code if there is anything out there that can possibly do what you want already. (And while that superficially looks like what bloop_bleep said, I won't presume that is what was meant, precisely).
I feel pretty strongly that a programmer should not try to avoid programming. Of course, you could take that to ridiculous extremes (by writing your own operating system, language to program it in, etc, etc) and I don't really mean that. Rather, code is more than functionality. The shape of the code matters quite a lot. Your involvement with the code matters too. Ideally you should feel free to refactor, or extend any piece of code that you use. Libraries and frameworks get in the way of that. It gets especially bad if the library or framework does not have source code, or doesn't come with a license that allows you to modify it.
In large projects, I find that the choice to write your own is not nearly as costly (over the long term) as many people assume. As a good example of this, I was playing with FontForge on the weekend and the author wrote his own cross platform widget set. He's written pretty extensively about it and while he doesn't necessarily encourage other people to use it, he reckons it's saved him quite a lot of time and headaches. I reckon he's right, but it has always been a controversial decision for him and he's taken quite a lot of criticism for it. Who is crazy enough to write a widget set in this day and age? (granted, he started the project 10 years ago).
I think it's fair to say that writing display code (or yet another physics engine ;-) ) can easily distract you from writing your game. So if you are concerned about that, then reaching for a library may be a good idea. However, it's not going to be anywhere near the most complex piece of code you are going to be writing over the long term -- so if you like programming and you are fine with settling in for a lot of sessions, "reinventing the wheel" can have many benefits (not least of which is that it is fun). Of course, you could end up writing an incredible voxel engine instead of writing a game, like this guy...
http://www.voxelquest.com/
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Topic: How did they make the graphics of this game? (Read 4555 times)