I hear it everywherere “this game is gonna use that engine” … Google doesn’t seem to give me a good explanation, so here I am…
In: 1094
Probably it has been explained quite well by now but I’ll throw in my 2p.
An ‘engine’ is like a toolset for making a game. It is a set of functionality which allows a team to make a game without doing every part from scratch every time. It usually allows code to be written to customise behaviour of things in the default set of behaviours provided, and it provides some kind of pipeline for content like art, sound, music and design to be added to the project and organised, connected up and turned into an interactive experience.
It’s like buying premade puff pastry, sugar and cinnamon to make cinnamon rolls, rather than growing the wheat and sugar cane and making the pastry from scratch and so on. You still need skills, and some extra components, like an oven, maybe a few ingredients from your own pantry. But it helps get a lot done in a shorter time!
Using off-the-shelf engines may result in the final games looking similar or familial, but it is not guaranteed – there are usually a lot of ways you can tailor and customise an engine to do exactly what you need, although part of their usefulness is the prepackaged-ness of many core parts of the software. Some folks can sense the engine used in a game “oh, that’s unity, look at the default cubemap”, but then again borderlands IIRC was made with unreal and it has a very distinct visual style. So it’s not right to say that games of a certain engine look similar, per se.
Commercial engines like unreal, unity and godot are designed to be very flexible and rich in features, to facilitate the widest range of users to adopt them for their projects. Bespoke engines built in house in games studios may often be very much more tailored to the specific needs of that game or team. But the goal is the same that it facilitates creation of their kind of games more efficiently than starting from scratch each time.
The term ‘engine’ may also be applied to sub-sections of the overall system – the visual part that gets data from memory into your eyes via a screen of some kind is the rendering or graphics engine, the physics engine might handle movement and interaction of objects, and if anyone is old like me and remembers back to the days of the playstation 2, they dubbed a particular part of their hardware the “emotion engine” but in truth that was just marketing – it was a weird kind of CPU 😛
Can’t think of much else to add off the top of my head, happy to answer questions. Source: I have made games professionally for 20+ years.
Latest Answers