That is not a very big studio or very big production, Blender falls over in the pipeline department. It’s a constantly changing API that doesn’t allow for the extensibility needed to get a major project out the door, just the fact that only a Python API is provided is enough for most people who have worked on massive scenes with massive amounts of data to consider it a non starter.
I might be in the minority, but I hate type re-definitions, I want types to just tell me how much memory a variable is using and it’s bit interpretation. Every variable already has a name, use that to communicate the data’s representation and if it’s really important that representation mismatches are caught at compile time wrap it in a struct. I don’t want to guess how much memory the compiler decided a variable needed (though that is also present to an extent in C/C++)
I've been working on language for a little over a year now. There's no documentation at all, just some examples if you can figure out how to run them. I thought building a compiler would take less time than it has, but it's been feeling like a good investment in my future of making things. It's a project I can just keep moving with forever.
PlayCanvas is a game engine that runs on browsers, but I’m not certain what it’s future will be, it was bought by SnapChat, but SnapChat has shut down running games in app.
A long time ago I had a company backchannel someone I actually would have listed as a reference except I knew he was out of country and on vacation. That left a sour taste in mouth and I ended up not going with their offer. So if you’re going to backchannel I’d suggest at least not cold calling.
Red Flags:
I spend too much time picking fonts, I have trust issues with black box code, I spend more time on making things easier to make than just making the things, I pace when I’m thinking and I can’t solve most problems without drawing it out.
Depends on the asset, most code or UI tools would probably be a no without a good amount of effort to port, 2D and particle assets you can most likely rip the image files and recreate in another engine with some work. 3D assets usually come with an FBX file (If they were made using Probuilder or something inside Unity you can use Unity's FBX exporter to get an FBX file) that you can easily transfer to another engine, there may be some edge cases where you'd have to re-rig the assets depending on the engine you're moving to. For animation assets they'll either be an FBX file that you can transfer over or an Unity Animation Clip that you can also convert to an FBX using the FBX exporter. Shaders are a little bit vendor locked if they were made with Shader Graph, you can get the generated source for the shaders, but it is generated which can make it hard to read (single letter variables/function names). There's a ton of edge cases you could run into depending on the engine you're moving too, like Z being up vs Y being up or engines using a different normal map tangent basis, but there's tools that can fix those issues when you come up against them.
If you’re on OSX I haven’t found any program better than Sequel Pro (sometimes referred to as Sequel pancakes). It’s one of a few programs that makes keeping a Mac around worth it.