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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A game engine is a tool to build games so you don’t need to worry about making everything yourself.
Let’s say you’re making a game, you might need: graphics, lighting, physics, animations, particle systems, file loading for multiple format, level editors, console support, artificial intelligence, and more.
Do you want to spend months/years researching how these things work, coding them, and optimizing them? Or do you just want to make the “game” part of your game – the running, jumping, & shooting stuff?
That’s what game engines are for. They’re a suite of systems that games rely on, already optimized for use. Someone has already done the work of calculating real world physics, or how light interacts with objects.
Most game studios nowadays license an existing engine (Unity, Unreal, etc), but there are still many who opt to make their own engines, which they leverage across multiple games.
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