I'd argue that those sorts of frameworks/tools are sort of like Unity. For the most part they "are" the platform that they target. Unfortunately this means that you typically have less control of the software. And of course you are constrained to what the software is designed to allow you to build- if you try to go outside it's capabilities you will easily run into barriers.
It's similar to Visual Basic in that regard; it's designed for standard Windows-based applications. And you CAN repurpose Visual Basic to make all sorts of different programs including full-screen games but you are fighting an uphill battle. of course with a game engine or game maker you would be fighting in the other direction. You aren't going to be creating, say, a UWP Clock App in Blender or Geovox, for example.
On the topic of Games, though, I sometimes write simpler game titles because I like exploring the possibilities of making modifications to the core concepts of a game. usually I write it directly in Windows Forms and create the appropriate game and render loops and draw everything manually to a PictureBox. This isn't ideal and I've run into it's limitations particularly with my Arkanoid clone but the alternative is to make a full-blown "game" using DirectX or a Toolkit like OpenTK which I find immensely complicates the entire process.
As an example, I gold-plated the living heck out of my Arkanoid clone, which has all sorts of ridiculous capabilities. It's possible to make Platform levels in the editor- I remember one of my test levels involved navigating Mario from one side of the level to the other, avoiding red shells and breaking bricks to allow them to open new paths to get a starman, which would allow you to kill the red shells and then killing all of them invoked a trigger which busted a wall of invincible blocks (while playing the "puzzle solved" chime from Zelda, naturally) allowing the one "required" block in the level to be broken to complete the stage. Then the next level had you fight a boss which was a snake like in various snake games composed of blocks. breaking one of it's component bricks would cause it to shoot a damaging fireball at the players paddle (paddles had health bars. It made sense at the time...). The goal was to hit the snake on the head block. This would kill it, resulting in an elaborate, drawn out death sequence as each segment of the snake broke from the tail upwards and then showered the paddle in Macguffins (I created a number of pointless items which give small health boosts or provide a slowly raising score multiplier or energy recharge and called them appropriately enough Macguffins). The music would stop, a victory music would play, and then when that stopped it would trigger a delay trigger which after a few moments would cause the level to be completed.
More recently, suddenly occurred to me that I had never written a tetris clone. I had tried in high school but it seemed beyond my grasp and I never tried again. Furthermore, I thought it would be neat to make it flexible- make it able to handle various similar puzzle games where you manipulate pieces on a cell-based board; Tetris, Tetris 2, etc. or custom variants, or support custom "skins" or styles so it can look like different implementations.
It was very easy to write and I didn't need any special libraries to do it, except for the BASS.NET library for Audio.
I modelled it after the NES Tetris game by Nintendo in terms of audio and visuals. The little blocks are all custom-drawn by the program and can scale to any size as well. interestingly, the code for drawing them was actually "stolen" from of all places an "Update" program, I had written it to draw coloured gummy circle icons to indicate update status and copied the routine and changed it to draw rectangles. I wrote it in standard Windows Forms just because I was comfortable with it- Besides, being Tetris I could never sell it anyway so there wouldn't be much reason to create a UWP App out of it anyway. I also had (and am having) lots of fun with writing the various mechanics and coming up with ways to implement things like a Next piece queue and a "Hold" piece capability.
