Game Engines Research

Intro

In the video game industry developers needed to know how to code in C++ to actually make their game however that is one very long and difficult task itself, as a way to speed up the making of the games and to help newer generations understand game development, programs were released specifically to aid creating video games. Those programs are called Game Engines and are used so that many people can work to develop a fully functioning game.

Timeline

The original Engine was created in 1987 and is the result of a collaboration between Hudson Soft and NEC. This software was named PC-Engine and was released shortly after the CD-ROM format however at the time the Sega Megadrive and Super Nintendo was also released and these machine ran games using C++ and (at the time) incredible processing technology. The PC-Engine didn’t do so well due to the console releases by Sega and Nintendo but at the same time, another Engine named Freescape launched the release of its first game Driller during the same year.

Game Engine software wasn’t really popular or used in industry until 1993 with the release of a revolutionary game Doom by Id Software. This video game drew a lot of attention from the public and introduced how game engines can change the way games are made and played. After this Id Software went on to create more titles that to this day are loved by the public. Shortly after Id Software’s first installment of the Quake series Epic Games Released Unreal and Unreal Tournament which shaped modern multiplayer and the way game engines are used in the industry. In the modern industry video game publishers and developers work on either developing their own private game engines or they use Unreal Engine/Unity to develop their next games. The general public can access certain versions of these game engine programs to develop their own games for competitions and a way into the industry.

Although the Id Tech Engine was not the first like most people think, it was this software that made the leap from 2D to 3D environments. Other game Titles may have looked 3D but the player would not be able to move inside that environment and they would only be able to interact with certain objects from one viewpoint. I have used an online editing program to develop my own timeline as a visual representation of the history these programs have been through.

2D Engines

Engines before 1990 didn’t feature 3D movements and that means the games show a significant difference in the way players must progress through the game and around the environments. Old Titles such as Rogue featured Top-Down or Side view maps which limited the player’s view and hid secret areas and items much better than some 3D environments in later games. Due to this lack of different perspectives and the higher difficulty of controlling these characters, 2D Engines are still used today to release Triple-A Titles that challenge the player in ways most modern games don’t and add nostalgia to the player’s experience. 2D Game Engines used their time to develop the technical capabilities and have resulted in producing many remarkable and challenging games.

3D Engines

Thanks to the intense capabilities of these programs the player can see from a first-person view with breathtaking scenes and environments. One way the movement to 3D Engines has changed gameplay is the player must now think more about the environment they are in and to be careful where they are in that environment. This is very useful to developers because the player will not always be able to see the entire environment and this allows developers to increase the difficulty of the game by hiding all the things a player would need to progress. 3D Engines have spent the majority of their development improving the graphical features of the software.

The image above shows a model that has been created, textured and animated in Maya and is now ready to export to Unreal Engine where Unreal will recognize the data in the Maya Binary file and apply blueprint coding so the player can see the jump animation when they press the jump button.

What you see here is a screenshot of me using the Flying Template in Unreal Engine 4 and adjusting the values of one solid object (Left side). Unreal has become recognizable for it’s ‘drag & drop’ interface and ‘Blueprint Coding’

Mobile Engines

There are a few engine programs which specialize in mobile development rather than PC or Console, However, well-funded Engines such as Unreal and Unity have mobile compatible capabilities as well as standard PC or Console.

Most used Game Engines for mobile game development are Java, Adobe Flash, GameSpark and Game Maker.

Purpose Of Game Engines

As I mentioned before Game Engines significantly reduces production time for developers. If the developers were to make a game without using an Engine Program then they would need an extensive knowledge of the programming language C++ and spend much longer coding the animations and movements than a Game Engine would. This is why these Engine Programs are used massively in the Video Game Industry, due to the simplicity of them compared to programming languages developers can use them with ease while the Engine Program does the coding for the developers.

Game Engines contain many tools and different interfaces which allow people to do industry standard modeling, coding, animation, rendering and physics ‘out of the box’, meaning there are no extra purchases, extensions or programs needed. Using Game Engines one person can develop their own AAA Game at industry standard by learning how to use all the different editors contained inside a Game Engines Software.

Rendering is the process that creates the visuals you see in the media industry. In video games, rendering is when the hardware generates the visuals as the player is playing the game. When using a package like Maya or Blender rendering would be one process done at the end of the project, however, game engines provide a real-time development workspace where you can see and test your project at a lower quality whilst also editing it.

Here is one of the developers working at Epic Games doing a demonstration of how to use the Unreal Engine 4 Program and creating a game within 20 minutes.