: How are game engines made and why are they necessary for games and why are there so many of those?
In: Technology
Game engines are essentially the “laws of physics”.
Almost any game you care to design is going to have the laws of physics apply in some sense.
Now it’s really hard work to write the entire laws of gravity and motion and how waves work from scratch. You could spend months just to make it get brighter when the sun comes up.
Luckily someone else has already done that hard work, and will let you use it as a foundation to build your world upon.
All the background stuff thats common to many different games, but is really laborious to do, is already available conveniently packaged for you in a “physics engine”. So you can focus on the things that make your game unique. Art, story, characters etc.
Much like designing a car. You know it’s going to need an engine, but engines are really bloody complicated and hard work, someone has already done all that hard work to a better standard and cheaper than you could. Letting you focus on the things that make your car unique.
If you’re a huge company with the money to do so, you may find it’s worth the investment to make a new engine catered specifically to your requirements, that will let you do things an off-the-shelf engine might not.
Whether it’s cars or games, a good engine is a significant investment, so once you’ve done all that work, you’ll want to use it in more than one car/game, and probably even sell it to other companies.
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