: How are game engines made and why are they necessary for games and why are there so many of those?
In: Technology
When you sit down to actually code a video game, you’ll quickly realize that there is a *lot* of groundwork that needs to be placed before you even get to anything specific to *your* game. Especially if you want to design your game in such a way that it’s easy to continue to develop and iterate on. Even for games in entirely different genres, there is a lot of work that will essentially be needed by all of them. Stuff like:
* Physics/Collisions
* Low-level graphics programming
* Input handling
* Animation Systems
* ( For really nice engines) A graphical editor for designing levels and other game elements
* Entity management
* and more!
Since all that is a lot of work, and people don’t want to redo it for every game they make, a market formed for people making *just* the groundwork stuff and then selling it (or open-sourcing it if you’re cool like Godot) so other people can use it and jump straight into making their own game without having to worry about all that stuff. Those products are “Game Engines”. To be clear, one isn’t *necessary* to make a game, but it sure does take out a lot of busywork.
Of course, every different engine brings with it the opinions of its designers and enforces a particular way of working with it. When people disagree with those, they might decide put in the work of designing and developing their own, which is why we get so many different game engines. There are loads of engines out there that most people have probably never even heard of because they are made by a studio strictly for their own internal use.
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