I tried my hands at game engines once. I tried to make Helena using the Torque engine, and made some zombie vs. humans game with it. My thoughts are that if you're going for really original gameplay, it's just too hard to tear an engine that far down and get it to do what you want it to. I know it works great for some people, it just doesn't work well with my style 
Thanks for the tip though. To be fair, there are also cross-platform network libraries out there made for games. Part of it was also just a personal challenge to myself to see what if I could do network programming.
