Alex and her journey through game art.: Engines!

A game engine is a software framework designed for the creation and development of video games. Video game developers use them to create games for video game consoles, mobile devices and personal computers. The core functionality typically provided by a game engine includes a rendering engine (“renderer”) for 2D or 3D graphics, a physics engine or collision detection (and collision response), sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking, streaming, memory management, threading, localization support, and a scene graph. The process of game development is often economized, in large part, by reusing/adapting the same game engine to create different games, or to make it easier to "port" games to multiple platforms.

Engines, okay I got this. Actually, no, this is one of my weaker points as well. So far we have documentation and engines. But what I know I am willing to share.

All engines have their strength, and are particularly aimed at different groups of people. This is often due to payments you have to cover for the use and publishing, rather than the technical aspect.

Personally I enjoy UDK, maybe it is not the best user friendly, or artist friendly even geared software. But give it a time and it can do miracles, bring you miserable meshes into life within its little environment, that you also get to create. Unreal Engine good sides are definitely of how simple – to advanced games you can create. It can be programming heavy, it offers a lot. However on the dark side, hah, dark side… it struggles with its real time lighting. As in, it’s really, really hard, so hard that you may not bother and just bake things in. If you are into day and night cycles, this is definitely not your best choice. But it allows you to make simple games, simple games that you would maybe prefer to use the Unity for, but it doesn’t quite click it. It’s good enough to give you opportunity of easy scripting and an alright user interface.

Then what about Unity? Well, it’s great, probably your first choice as small indie company, willing to start little project. It is user friendly, simple and doesn’t require heavy programming knowledge unlike UDK sometimes does. It offers broad range of tutorials on their site and it is lightweight in terms of computer spec requirements, unlike let’s say Cryengine. As I mention before it runs on multiple devices, like pc, android phones and tablets. Its licence is fairly priced and available for anyone with limited budget. It’s definitely a nice little engine to play around with.

Cryengine – runs on your tears. I am kidding, Cryengine is nice hefty engine, it offers great lighting settings, with correct settings and use you can make not so great things look great. Its nodes system is more understandable than that of Unreal, at least for me, and with plugin to export your stuff from 3ds max it’s definitely easier to navigate in, but that may be more of my personal preference again. Unlike UDK it is able to render real time light, day and night cycle and it is definitely your choice for realistic, high poly looking projects. However it’s pricing may not be a good starter for smaller studios.

There are many other engines that look amazing that I yet have to check out, like Snow Engine, good old Source engine and many more. Did you know there is engine called Game Salad that is mostly used for IPhone build? Well, there is. There is also one called Jedi, which is currently in the development; you can guess which game uses that.

Game engines are definitely something I need to look into more and something you have to try out yourself to fit most suitable one, I’ve only wrote down the popular choice ones and ones I had a chance to look at.

For full list of engines look here:

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