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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Engines are simply a base to build a game on. They handle common problems that many games need to solve so you can instead focus on what makes your game unique.
For example if I want to make a new shooter game someone already has a solution for moving, looking around, and shooting. Instead of figuring out how to make a basic gun that reloads after 5 shots I can focus on the parts of the game that are unique. Maybe I build a cool loot system or unique player progression.
There are engines anyone can use and some big studios have their own special ones. Sometimes you will notice similar features/issues in games that share an engine.
An alternative example to consider is a chess/checkers board. They use the same “engine” as a base of here are squares your pieces can be on. They build their unique rules on top of that base. The base engine handles rules for them like valid play area and that on your turn you can move a piece. It’s a simple example compared to video games where the engine will do much more.
You know how some games come with level editor? Sometimes, creative people use these editors to create what amounts to almost a whole new game, like the original DotA, which was a Warcraft 3 map. Now, imagine the editor gives you a whole buttload of freedom. You can add entire new models, scripts, even toy with the physics etc. And because your target audience are people trying to make their own game, that’s pretty much all you ship, with no base game to go along. That’s essentially an engine.
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.
Here’s the linguistic answer: Engine comes from the Latin word ingenium which is either a talent or a device.
It morphed a little and turned into any slightly complex device that does a specific thing: for example animal snares and traps were called engines.
In modern day, engines are commonly associated with devices that allow for locomotion, but the older, more general meaning is still used sometimes: game engines, which are complex software built up to handle game related things for game makers to build on to make games. In other words, a slightly complicated device that does a specific thing.
Engine is occasionally used for ideas like “economic engine” which could either be the old use of the word or the newer locomotive use i.e. “Driving the economy forward.”
A (graphic) engine is a program that is used to create a videogames.
You need Paint to draw digital art, rigth? People used engines to develop videogames.
Most famous ones are Unity and Unreal Engine.
Think of it like Lego, Duplo, and K’Nex.
If you wanted to build a little replica of, say, the Death Star. You could try and melt down your own plastics to create blocks from scratch … but that is a LOT of work.
It’s a lot easier to pick a set of pre-fab blocks to use. The manufacturer does a lot of the basic work for you, and there are probably some samples out there for you to copy.
Each set of building blocks has their pros and cons, and you (the builder) might just have a favorite that you’re comfortable with.
That’s what a video game engine is. A company does a lot of the “low level” work for you. You can still be an expert programmer using an engine (the same way someone can be an expert Lego builder without forging their own bricks)
Explaining like you’re 5: Microsoft Word is to writing a novel as Unreal Engine is to making Fortnite.
Not much I can add to this. Games used to be painstakingly created from the ground up each and every time, there’s a lot of analogies you could use for this. Cooking a dish from painstakingly gathered and hunted ingredients, building a car by first smithing each part yourself etc.
At some point, people, and businesses, figured out that games, outside of their unique things, do a lot of the same things. Things that can be pretty much dropped into a new project with little, if any, alteration. Rather than making your own mayonaise you can just get it from a bottle because somebody else alreaady made it. I’d say that’s what we can call a “library”. You could also consider this a lego brick; one brick does graphics, another brick does audio, you just click them together, now you have graphics and audio in your game handled, ready for the content folks to record lines and design graphics for the game to show.
Stick a bunch of these together into a somewhat comprehensive package, and you get an engine. So, essentially a lego set that gives you a place to start from, or an easyMeal that you can still add your own spin to. That’s really the long and hsort of it.
What an engine SPECIFICALLY is will vary a lot, but functionally an engine is a collection of support oriented code that handles a lot of common features that virtually all games will require.
One simple example is a physics system. Unless you are trying to do something weird and interesting, your physics system will probably be the same as most other games. Gravity goes down at a particular rate, “Friction” slows things down, something spinning will keep spinning till it hits something, etc.
You don’t need to rewrite all that code for each and every project, you can simply grab an engine that already has a physics system, and then you arrange your art assets and game code to use it.
The point I raised at the beginning about it varying is that not all game engines are specced into doing the same thing. If you are making a first/third person shooter, then Unreal will help you with a lot of the common problems that you will encounter. If you want to make a grand strategy game like Crusader Kings or Stellaris, then you’re going to want to look for an engine that specializes more in database management because the problems you are going to run into are different.
Or to put more specifically, most engines have a physics system, but not all engines do because not all game types actually need one.
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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