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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You’ve gotten some good answers, but if you want to take it a step farther you should see it in action. It doesn’t have to be video games. If you want to see modern computer animations at work and see some pretty neat large project workflow go check out the Disney Plus mini series about the making of frozen 2. There are multiple scenes where an animator is using software that is basically the animation process. That’s all occurring in an engine, the animator isn’t programming at a math level they are using an engine and just manipulating pieces of the character, the engine handles how that all translates to the screen and rendering it in 3d.
Think of an engine like Lego. You don’t need to use Lego to build the Millennium Falcon, but if you do, a lot of the hard work is done for you.
A game engine is an underlaying framework that games are built on that provides all the premade components for how a computers makes all the 3d objects and how they all interest, from the textures to the AI that handles how the NPCs move around a world, even down to how the networking is done for online games.
Games that use the same engine tend to have a similar feel, if you’ve played The Elder Scrolls or more recent Fallout games, they’re using the ‘Creation’ engine, which is notorious for having very odd/rigid NPC movement and character interaction, along with sometimes hilarious game physics.
A game engine is like a premade empty game – there are no characters, no graphics or sound, just a blank level **but** the blank level contains all the programming code needed to load and display these things.
So a game developer just needs to add all the characters and all the level data and the music and program how the characters move and interact.
That’s not a small job of course, but without a game engine you also need to program all the parts to even draw 3D graphics and load 3D models. It’s a lot more work than using an engine.
Reasons you might not use an engine are if you want to do something special with the graphics that the engine isn’t programmed to do, or you’re a big company about to make an extremely popular game and think the money spent making a game without an engine will be less than an engine would charge you to use.
It’s basically a toolbox for all the things needed to make a video game: utilities for drawing graphics, playing sound, handling input, etc. It’s up to you to use those tools to actually make your game though.
Just as a car’s engine is a collection of parts that makes the entire car work, a game engine is a collection of parts that makes the game work.
Software of any kind consists of dozens of individual sub-systems that handle everything from graphics processing to user input to audio output and network interfaces. The software doesn’t automatically ‘know’ what any of that is — all of those sub-systems have to be programmed from scratch, and they’re often *incredibly* complex and time-consuming to create.
The end result of all of that programming work becomes a ‘game engine’ — a largely re-useable framework of sub-systems that powers the game you see on the screen.
An engine can be used for multiple games, with the audio, graphics, and network code already in place and working — there’s no need to re-write any of the sub-systems unless the designers decide to add a new feature that the engine wasn’t designed to handle.
A really simple analogy that i posted earlier but it got auto deleted by a moderator bot, evidently because it was too short.
The game is “Go Fish”. The game is “War”. The game is “Solitaire”. The game is “Crazy 8s”. The game is “Rummy”. The game is “Slapjack”
All those games share the same game “engine”the standard deck of cards.
Yeah, in reality it is a bit more complicated than that, but if I was explaining it to a five year old, that is a decent way to explain the concept.
So a game is made of many different components: graphics, sound, gameplay, menus etc.
The engine is just the program that is used to put all these components together and present it as a playable game.
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.
Late to this party, but consider poker, or whatever game the cool kids play these days. The rules and instructions for playing poker are the “game”, but the dealer is the “game engine”; the rules, for instance, say “give 5 cards to each player”, but the dealer is the one that actually knows how and does it.
Similarly, the game decides what it wants to draw on the screen, what sound it wants to play and when, how it wants to interpret inputs, but it’s the game *engine* that actually draws the thing, plays the sound, or reports “the player just pressed Q”.
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