I'll be using Unity and C#. I believe I have the best change to get something finished with Unity. I try to stick to what I know, so that I could concentrate on making the actual game, but my Unity skills are also lacking a bit. 😊

I'm researching writing a cross-platform, text-rendering engine using GLFW + Vulkan in C.
It should support building, running, and cross-compiling on Linux, Windows, and MacOS. 

I've prototyped a cross-platform, monorepo build tool for the project which parses linker flags from modules and calls gcc\clang\msvc + cmake. It is implemented in a single file which the developer compiles then calls to build everything else.

I've got pixels on screen and keyboard support, but no text rendering or layout yet.

Researching stb_truetype, freetype, harfbuzz.

To draw pixels with vulkan, I am using vkCmdCopyBufferToImage to copy the data  from the current frame's memory mapped pixel buffer  to the internal swapchain image, without setting up a graphics pipeline \ rasterizer. For whatever reason this is faster than using SDL_Renderer.

I might setup a rasterizer anyway in order upload a texture atlas ( sprite sheet for baked font characters), in order to render text using a textured quad per character.

Another idea is to possibly use FreeType to write pixel data on CPU directly to my memory mapped pixel buffer, if it can support the right output format.

A third idea is to render text on CPU using an extra internal pixel buffer saved between frames, then blend pixels from multiple frames at an offset when copying from the state buffer to memory mapped buffer, to implement temporal anti-aliasing and possible pixel format conversion.