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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To put it even simpler, it’s like asking if the new painting is going to be made with spray paint, acrylic paint or oil paint. Or if the image will be made in MsPaint or Photoshop or if the document will be written in Notepad or in Word or Google Doc before it is made into a .pdf. There are programs for making games, that allow you to set up everything, all objects, the player, the camera, and then you click a button to save the project as a game. But there are different programs, and some specialize in different aspects. Some are good for games for your smartphone, others are good for photorealistic games for newest PlayStation.
Say you are building a car. You probably just want to assemble the car parts to get the design you want. But where do you get the parts? Do you know how to make engines, chassis, brakes, etc.? Even if by some miracle you know how to make each individual part, do you know how to acquire the materials? Are you a miner? Metallurgist? Rubber farmer? And if you magically know all of THOSE skills, how long is it going to TAKE you to synthesize everything you need to build that car?
Just like with a car, the further you drill down into the details of making a video game, the more impossible the quantity of knowledge and labor becomes. To help with that, some companies have compiled all the “parts” of a video game beforehand, allowing you to assemble the components into a game you want at a much higher level than if you were starting from scratch.
There is a lot of work between the game idea, and pixels on the screen / sound.
A long time ago all games were written from the scratch, but developers don’t like repeating the work. They soon realised they can take parts that they already figured out and that are the same or similar in multiple games and just reuse them.
The engine is the part between the code that describes your game rules and ideas, and the computer (visual and sound effects, user input, network connectivity etc.)
I’m a gameplay engineer, so I feel qualified to answer this one. Everyone I’ve seen in this thread is focusing on graphics, and that is part of it. But only a small part of it.
When you’re playing various video games, they may look and feel entirely different, but under the hood, the code is doing more or less the same thing for:
– efficiently sending all your game’s sprites, 3D models, and textures to the graphics card, so you can see what’s going on (called “rendering”).
– loading sounds and playing them on command with options to modify those sounds a little bit here and there.
– reach out through the internet and find other people playing the same game, so you can play together.
– creating a simple interface so game designers with little to no programming experience can add and modify stuff in the game.
– connecting to controllers, mouse and keyboard, or other input devices.
– making sure the code and art and sound is compatible with a variety of platforms, such as Android/iOS/Windows/Mac/Linux/Xbox/Playstation/Switch/etc.
And so much more. The point I’m getting to is that to matter what game you’re making, odds are that it’s going to need most, if not all of the things on that list. And all of those things are really hard to do. A game engine’s job is to bundle up all that commonly used functionality that many games need, but leave you enough flexibility to do whatever unique things your game does. By using an existing engine (such as Unreal, Unity, Godot, or others) you can start off with all that common stuff done, and can focus your development resources towards making your game instead of reinventing the wheel for that list I gave above.
It is similar to cooking. If I buy an already made lasagna, and add an extra layer of cheese, I used the ‘engine’ of someone else doing the majority of it and added a small change. If I made everything from scratch, from the noodles to the sauce, then I created something from a recipe. When doing this method, it takes more time and effort, but also have control of all the details which can have larger impacts.
You can make a very nice image in paint or in photoshop.
Think of the image as the game and the program used to make it as the engine.
A game engine is kind of like a kitchen, it has a lot of tools and ingredients ready for you to use to make a game.
A lot of companies make their own engines so that the tools work exactly the way they want. For a lot of people though a public engine (Unity, Unreal, Godot, etc.) takes care of a lot of basic things they don’t want to spend time on like physics, rendering, or lighting.
When you’re making a simple game like Pacman, it’s not too much work to write the code that handles things like graphics output, animation, point scoring, collision detection (have you hit a wall, a dot, a pill, an enemy) etc. but as game get more and more complex with 3D graphics, complex animations etc. that becomes a significant part of the work of making a game.
A game engine is a sort of toolkit or template for making games ,which handles a lot of that stuff for you, so you can focus on making the “content” part of the games without having to e.g. tell the computer how to store geometry and output that to graphics every time you want to make a new game.
nowadays game engines are a workshop full of tools and off the shelf parts that you can use to build your game.
say you were to build a bike or a car, you don’t want to have to worry about how to make a tire or a wheel. but no worries, the game engine/workshop has a whole assortment of wheels you can choose from and all the nuts and bolt, screw drivers and hammers required to install the wheel.
although you might still need to build a custom wheel cover, you won’t have to worry about the break disks and the hydrolics.
the name engine is chosen because in the early days it was much more like just the engine of a car.
An engine might have a set of character models. You can skin them any way you want, but the way the characters can move and respond are preprogrammed, and you pick the one you want.
It might have certain types of environments. Buildings, objects, plants, etc. you select what to use and put it together.
An engine can create a map, and determine which parts of the map can be accessed or how NPCs can move around on their own without getting stuck.
Basically, an engine is a set of tools one uses to put a game together. The actual appearance of things can be skins created elsewhere, but those skins sit on a preprogrammed framework that the game developer selected out of the engine toolset.
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