Eli5: What does it mean for a video game to run on a certain “engine”?
In: Technology
Think of a game engine like this – it’s equal parts blueprint and final product.
Modern games are very complex. You don’t just need the code that makes everything work – you need artistic assets, meticulously crafted sounds, professional writing, smooth animations, and good world design. This encompasses a variety of jobs that no small group of people can perform in a reasonable development time.
The solution? A game engine. The engine plays two parts – first, it ensures that the developers can put together all of the aspects of a game smoothly and logically. Second, it allows all of these aspects to integrate into a final product playable by the consumer.
When in development, an engine provides tools for the developers. It allows programmers simple and easy control over assets so they can create effective code. It allows audio and visual asset creators to upload their work into an environment with consistent rules such as lighting and audio features. It gives level designers tools to create terrain, place assets, and craft a good looking environment. It enables animators to craft how each character moves as perfectly as they want. It allows writers a way to logically organize quests/missions and craft game progression, as well as provide the lore across the game environment.
When being played, the engine organizes all of the assets and coding provided by the developers into a playable and enjoyable game for the consumers.
For small indie developers, utilizing an open source or easily licensed engine enables them to create professional caliber games with fewer resources. For major game studies like Bethesda and Rockstar, creating an in-house engine allows them to perfect their craft and create consistency in their work, all while tailoring to their particular development style.
A lot of what a game needs to do, *most* games need to do. Things like lighting a scene, animating a character, detecting a collision, determining physics etc.
An engine is essentially a common library of code ensuring game developers don’t need to waste time re-inventing the wheel every time they start work on a new game. Developers work with an existing engine so they can focus on, for example, unique gameplay mechanisms and interesting art assets, rather than coding the underlying frameworks again and again.
Often these engines also feature toolsets to make workflows easier and make the development process more responsive and visual.
New engines usually come along when hardware changes make old code obsolete, or when the developer has unique ideas or special requirements for the underlying features. Things like procedural worlds often need bespoke engines, for example.
A game engine is basically a game, minus the actual game. So if you start with Minecraft, and you delete the dirt blocks, and the stone blocks, and the grass blocks, and the pickaxes, and the shovels, and the diamonds, and the cows, and the pigs, and so on… you are left with a “template” for a game where everything is made of blocks. Not an actual game, because you’d need to put all that stuff back in. But now you can make a blocky game that’s completely different from Minecraft – e.g. you could make a first-person shooter with blocky graphics, or Subnautica with blocky graphics. The template part is called an engine.
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