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…
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I will assume that you know snakes and ladders.
So, you roll a dice and your circle/object moves ahead on the board by the same number that you rolled your dice. At the end, if your objects lands on the bottom of a ladder, you climb up it and if it falls on the head part of the snake, your object slides down.
There can be a few other rules, but the game ends once a player’s object/circle reaches the end number at the top-left.
Given these rules, you could draw up your own snakes-and-ladders board. A standard board is a 10×10 grid consisting of 100 numbers, but yours doesn’t have to be that way. The placement of snakes and ladders can be of your choosing. You can build a custom board around the snakes-and-ladders rules.
Thus, in the above example, I would say that the rules that govern the rules of snakes-and-ladders is its game engine. Various custom boards can be the actual games.
Similarly, in a computer game, there is an underlying rule that dictates various interactions between players and objects. The logic/code/program that dictates this interaction can generally be considered its engine. Since modern games are much more complicated that a snakes-and-ladders games, game developers usually opt to use an existing engine than to build their own from scratch. Such engines also take care of graphics rendering aspects, and sometimes even physics of interaction. Similar to building a custom board, developers are free to develop story, levels, assets, etc to give their game their own unique look and feel.
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