The Power Behind Video Games: A Look at Game Engines
The video game industry has moved in leaps and bounds over the last couple of decades. Each new generation of consoles brings with it a swath of exciting new titles and ground-breaking features, which didn’t seem possible just a few short years before. There have been trials and triumphs both, but it would be wrong to say that this market has been moving in the wrong direction.
Of course, though, while many people would attribute the success of many modern games to the hardware which runs them, the code behind the scenes is also doing more work than ever before. Game engines are the true power behind video games. Many of the world’s most beloved franchises simply wouldn’t be where they are today without the hard work which has gone into creating engines that offer the features developers need.
What Is A Game Engine?
You might be scratching your head at this point, thinking “What is a game engine?”. These tools are rarely the topic of conversation during game announcements, and it’s unlikely that you’ve had much exposure to them unless you associate with a particularly nerdy crowd. Either way, it’s always good to brush up, so what exactly is a game engine?
In simple terms, a game engine is an IDE (integrated development environment) which has been specifically designed to be used to build video games.
There are only two minimum requirements for a game engine; it needs a script editor for writing code and a compiler to run it. This means that a tool as simple as Microsoft Visual Studio can be used as an engine or even have an engine built within it.
Of course, though, there aren’t any major developers using tools like Visual Studio as the foundation of their titles, and this is for good reason. Even the simplest of 2D games need to be able to redraw the screen, display sprites and textures, playback audio, and register the player’s controls. As you’ve probably seen from the games you’ve played, most modern titles have come far beyond this.
Game engines like Unity, Unreal, and Source, just to name a few, all offer advanced features. To start, most modern engines can be used to create games which operate in a 3D space. They also manage things like physics, lighting, particle effects, cutscenes, and a vast array of other crucial game elements (don’t worry, we’ll touch on those later). In essence, the game engine provides the foundations for the developer’s creativity, giving them all the tools they need to create great games.
A Brief History Of Game Engines
Back in the old days, long before games companies started to publish their titles across a range of platforms, games engines didn’t really exist. Instead, games would be designed from the ground up, built around the hardware that they were designed to work on. For example, if a game were released on both the Atari 2600 and the Magnavox Odyssey in the ’70s, the title would have to be written twice; once for each console.
It wasn’t until the ’80s that the concept of a game engine started to gain widespread popularity. Many of the options coming about at the start of the decade were aimed at consumers, with examples like Bill Budge’s Pinball Construction Set from 1983 giving people at home the chance to build games for themselves. Sounds fun, right?
While both developers and consumers alike were sinking their teeth into what would be considered games engines by today’s standard all the way back in the ’80s, this term didn’t start to be used until the mid-’90s. id Software’s Doom and Quake were met with staggering popularity when they were first released, with the first-person shooter genre never having been realized in such a ground-breaking fashion before.
With copies of these games flying off of the shelves, other companies wanted to get in on the action. Rather than spending huge amounts of time and money making their games from scratch, though, they would simply licence existing code from companies like id Software and start from there. They would write their own stories, create new graphics, and design fresh levels, but the core of the game’s architecture would be the same.
As 1998 rolled around, Epic Games released the first version of the well-known Unreal Engine. This marks a turning point for game development, where the vast majority of designers started to use third-party engines to make their games, with the benefits of these tools finally making up for their high cost. As a result, we’re able to enjoy a new Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty, and Battlefield game each and every year… so maybe engines aren’t such a good thing after all?
2020’s Top 12 Game Engines
As we come back to the present, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that the modern market has been practically flooded with different engines in recent years. Some of these are great, but there are also plenty of flops and loads of tools which are only designed to work with one or two platforms. We’re going to be casting aside the riff-raff, pushing mediocre engines to the curb as we take a look at the top 12 game engines in 2020.
CryEngine
While CryEngine was released back in 2002, it wasn’t until 2004 that the first game would be released having been made with this engine; Far Cry. While this was the beginning of a very successful run for this engine, it’s best-known early achievements came with Crysis. This game has become somewhat of a meme in the decades since and was still being used as a benchmark for PC performance more than 10 years later.
This is because Crytek took a no-compromises approach to developing their engine, ensuring that it would offer developers the tools to make their games look as realistic as possible. This legacy has continued well into the modern age of gaming, and CryEngine is still one of the most popular engines on the market.
You can download CryEngine for free from its website but will have to pay royalties for any money you make with a game using their platform. This gives you full access to a comprehensive marketplace which is choc-full of unique and interesting assets, many of which are completely free. There is also documentation, tutorials, and a strong community behind CryEngine, giving you a range of resources to learn from.
Just because you can get your hands on the software and user manual, though, you will probably still have a fairly hard time getting to grips with CryEngine unless you’ve already worked with similar tools before. The CryEngine is coded in C++, Lua and C#.
The Crysis and Far Cry franchises are two of the most popular to come out of CryEngine, but there are plenty of other titles which were also made with this tool. Kingdom Come: Deliverance and MechWarrior Online, along with numerous other titles, are great examples of Crytek’s success. They have long pioneered industry-leading visuals with their engine, giving gamers plenty to drool over for years gone by.
Notable Games: Crysis, Hunt: Showdown, Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, Far Cry
Frostbite
Frostbite was created by DICE all the way back in 2008. It was originally designed to be used to create first-person shooters, and Battlefield was the first game which was built upon this framework. There have been three versions of the Frostbite video game engine, with Frostbite 3 being responsible for some of the world’s biggest yearly releases.
Unfortunately, Frostbite has met fierce criticism from journalists, players, and even developers in recent years. In 2019, sources within BioWare claimed that the development of Anthem had been made more challenging thanks to the complexity of this engine. This might be a valid criticism, but there are also claims that the engine isn’t suitable for anything other than FPS games, limits options for developers, and even that it is just outright buggy.
Once they have had a few updates, the games which come out of Frostbite are often technological masterpieces. They look gorgeous, they run reasonably well on mid-range machines, and they often include advanced features like level destruction and intelligent AI. Unfortunately, though, the odds are that you’ll never get the chance to work with this video game engine.
There are two routes to working with Frostbite; finding a job with an EA developer or getting EA to publish your game and let you use Frostbite to make it. This might be sad, but don’t despair; you can still play games like Madden NFL, FIFA, and Plants vs. Zombies to enjoy the power of this video game engine. We bet that you didn’t know that Plants vs. Zombies and Battlefield were made using the same tools.
Notable Games: Battlefield: Bad Company 2, FIFA 20, Anthem, Star Wars: Battlefront II
Unreal Engine
As we said earlier, Unreal Engine was one of the very first true video game engines to hit the market. The first version was released way back in 1998, with the demos for Unreal blowing consumers away with the level of visual quality it promised to provide. The original engine began production in 1995, with much of the code being written by one man; Tim Sweeney. The engine debuted with the launch of Unreal, a first-person shooter which took advantage of the engine’s colored lighting, collision detection, and an array of unique visual effects.
It didn’t take long for work to start on Unreal Engine 2, and the next generation was released in 2002. Fan-favorites like Killing Floor and Unreal Tournament were made using the engine at this time, and there are countless other games which have been made using it. Today, Unreal has reached its fourth generation, and Epic Games is continuing to update and improve the tools they offer all the time.
Like CryEngine, you can download and use Unreal Engine for free. If you publish a game, you will have to pay 5% of the money you make from it to Epic Games, but they don’t charge anything else. This is pretty good, giving you the chance to get started with their tools right away. With loads of documentation and countless detailed tutorials available for this video game engine, learning how to use Unreal isn’t as hard as getting into a tool like CryEngine. Unreal Engine is written in C++.
Although Unreal Engine 4 saw the removal of UnrealScript, the previous engines native scripting language, it saw the introduction of Blueprints. This Blueprints Visual Scripting system gave game designers the ability to quickly prototype by connecting elements such as Nodes, Events and Functions together with Wires. This fast way to start prototyping games also made it far easier for non-developers to get ideas for a game or level fleshed out quickly.
When we say a lot of games have been made using Unreal Engine, we mean A LOT. Fortnite was made with this engine, and this is by far one of the most popular games on the market right now. Along with this game, though, Chivalry, Gears 5, Borderlands 3, and Octopath Traveller are some of the other recently released games which have been made using Unreal and have been met with acclaim. Literally hundreds of games have been made with Unreal Engine, making it one of the most ubiquitous development tools in the world.
One of the most incredible uses of the Unreal Engine is within movies and TV, with shows like Disney’s The Mandalorian utilising the engine to create its environments and sets. This jump from games to movies and TV really highlights the ability of the engine to create life-like graphics.
Notable Games: Deus Ex, What Remains of Edith Finch, Fortnite, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
Unity
Unity had a strange entry into the world, being released back in 2005 as a video game engine exclusively for Mac OS X. When Apple’s App Store first launched, Unity was considered to be pretty much the only tool worth using to make games for iPhones, but it didn’t stop with Apple. The engine now supports more than 25 platforms, including computers, consoles, and smartphones. You can use Unity for free as long as your business is making less than $100,000 each year.
“Unity is the worst engine in the world”. “Unity can be used to make any game imaginable”. “Unity is just a learning tool”. These are just a few examples of the things you might hear about this engine, but you shouldn’t let it put you off. While Unity has gone down a long road to reach the point it is in today, it has long been capable of creating titles worthy of being considered triple-As.
It is true that Unity is a great engine for those who want to learn, but it could also be the ideal engine for you to create your best game yet. Unity comes with one of the biggest development communities you’ll find on the web, packed to the brim with friendly geeks who are happy to help you stumble through the learning process with this tool. Along with this, there are also plenty of tutorials which come with source code, and documentation for every aspect of Unity’s own class library.
Previously, you had two options for coding in Unity; C# and UnityScript. Games could use one or the other, but UnityScript was only used by a small minority of projects and as such had its plug pulled in 2017.
Unity has an advanced physics engine, works with tools like Maya and 3DX Max, and offers everything you’d find in an engine like Unreal. If you’ve never made a game or have some experience with other engines, it’s worth giving Unity a try, as its scope and options could surprise you.
Superhot, Subnautica, Hearthstone, Tabletop Simulator, and even PewDiePie: Legend of the Brofist are all great examples of the technical achievements of the Unity team. Okay, so maybe that last game doesn’t fall into the legendary category, but we thought it would be wrong to leave it out.
Notable Games: GTFO, Untitled Goose Game, Outer Wilds, Hollow Knight, Two Point Hospital
GameMaker
GameMaker is an engine that is primarily used to create 2D games. GameMaker was first released in 1999, and was designed as a way for the ‘non-coder types’ to access game development tools. The engine was taken up by YoYo Games in 2007, but development hasn’t stopped, and new features are being released every few months. GameMaker is much easier to use than many other engines. Though you will not be able to do complex 3D titles.
Of course, that isn’t to say that there isn’t room for a primarily 2D engine in the world. To use something like Unity or Unreal to create a 2D game is simply overkill. You will have loads of tools which you don’t need in the way, a resource-hungry application to run, and will have to work harder to perform simple 2D tasks. This gives GameMaker a solid place in the market, while also making it an excellent choice for those looking to start their own game development journey.
GameMaker features a unique visual block-based programming system which makes it incredibly easy to code your game. For more advanced features, you will have to use the GameMaker Programming Language, but there are tons of resources around the web which will make this a breeze. Learning to use sprites can be a little tricky, and you may need to spend some time practising before you nail the animations you want in your game. Many popular games have been created using GameMaker, including Hotline Miami, Undertale, and Spelunky.
Notable Games: Katana Zero, Heat Signature, Undertale, Risk of Rain
Godot
Godot is an open-source 2D and 3D engine which was originally released in 2014 under an MIT Licence. The software has seen three versions in the years since its release, and the platform is still going strong as a free option for those who want to develop complicated games. The engine comes with an array of different features, and the feature set it brings to the table is fairly comparable with Unity.
Much like the other engines in this round-up, you can find loads of great documentation for Godot on their website. Along with this, there is a strong community for you to get sucked into, and you’ll never be short on people to beg for help when you find yourself in a jam. Being open-source, this system isn’t quite as polished as a tool like Unity, though this doesn’t mean that it can’t perform just as well in the right hands.
Godot offers a huge amount of flexibility to programmers, with support for C#, C++, and their own set of proprietary tools called GDScript. This should enable even the laziest of developers to start making projects without having to do too much learning. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find examples of popular games made with Godot. While it is a good learning tool, it simply can’t compete with the aggressive marketing campaign of a company like Unity.
Amazon Lumberyard
Most people aren’t aware that Amazon has made their own game engine, and this is probably because they haven’t.. Kind of. Lumberyard was released in 2016 as a free video game engine and has been in Beta ever since. Amazon licenced CryEngine to build their own platform out of, performing minimal changes to things like physics, rendering, and lighting, instead focusing their attention on connecting the engine to their other AWS offerings. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Amazon bought their engine; this is how many of their products come to be.
Building with Amazon Lumberyard should be just as easy as working with CryEngine. You’ll be using C++, but will have access to even more tutorials, forums, and juicy, juicy documentation pages, all of which are being updated all the time. There aren’t many games to talk about with Lumberyard as yet, other than Star Citizen. The game that has so far taken 8 years and promises to be one of the most ground-breaking games of the decade — if indeed, it does ever sees the light of day as a finished product.
Notable Games: Star Citizen, New World
Source
Some love it, some hate it, but just about every PC gamer on the planet has experienced it, even if they don’t know it. What else could it be, but Source? Source has been Valve’s main development engine since way back in 2004, where it debuted alongside the release of Counter-Strike: Source.
Source 2 was announced in 2015, with the first game releasing on this platform being Dota 2. Recently, Valve released the VR experience Half-Life: Alyx using the Source 2 engine and this game shows what the engine is capable of.
Despite the updates to Source and the release of Half-Life: Alyx, this engine is showing its age more than ever compared to other engines, and it’s easy to spot when a game has been made using it. Of course, though, this hasn’t stopped a rampant modding community from using these tools to create all manner of strange and interesting mods. Unfortunately, developing your own game with Source is going to cost quite a bit, and this means that modding existing games is one of the only options if you want to use this video game engine.
It doesn’t really matter that Source is a little past its prime; the games which have been made with it will go down in history forever. Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, and a range of other hugely popular games have been made with Source, and Valve is finally picking up with new games after several years of quietness. Of course, you can’t forget the greatest sandbox of all time; Garry’s Mod.
Notable Games: Half-Life 2, The Stanley Parable, Left 4 Dead 2
id Tech
id Software has long been a pioneer in the video game engine space, offering one of the first options for developers looking for a quicker way to build their games. The id Tech engine debuted in 1993 with the release of Doom, followed by several major updates and titles leading to id Tech 7, the engine we have today.
Unfortunately, much like Frostbite, trying to get your hands on a copy of the id Tech engine is going to require getting a job somewhere which is using the engine to develop a game, though this isn’t very common nowadays. id Tech 7 came out with the release of Doom Eternal, and it’s impossible to argue that they haven’t come a long way since their humble beginnings in the early ’90s. While id Tech isn’t used for a wide range of titles, those that are made with it using innovative and experimental features. We’ll explore this a little bit more below.
Notable Games: Doom Eternal, Wolfenstein II: The New Order, Quake II
IW Engine
The IW Engine is another engine which most people will have come into contact with, but you may not have realized quite what you were using. The IW Engine was originally debuted in 2003 with the release of Call of Duty. Interestingly, Infinity Ward used a modified version of the id Tech 3 engine for the first release of this record-breaking franchise, though this changed with the release of Call of Duty 2 in 2005, as Infinity Ward built a proprietary engine to meet their needs.
This engine has had a huge amount of updates over the years, and practically all of the main Call of Duty titles have been built using variants of this powerful platform.
Okay, so it’s hard not to argue that most of the recent Call of Duty titles have lacked the finesse of the predecessors. This could be down to the yearly release schedule that Call Of Duty titles now adhere to, to please their Activision publisher.
One of the big surprises recently, was just how polished the latest iteration of the franchise is. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was released in October 2019 and featured a far more enhanced engine that gave the game a far more gritty, and realistic look. Michal Drobot, the Principal Rendering Engineer at Infinity Ward, stated that “we had to create a new engine, purpose-built for Modern Warfare”, and it shows. The game is a far cry from the more cartoony look of Black Ops 4.
As IW Engine is a proprietary engine from one of the biggest publishers in the world, the only way you’ll ever get the opportunity to take it for a spin will be if you manage to get a job with Infinity Ward, Treyarch, or one of the other developers making games in this franchise.
Notable Games: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2
Anvil
Ubisoft is another one of the big players in the game publishing space, with many popular franchises under the belt. This means that it’s only right that they have their own engine for all of the development they do, and this is where Anvil comes in. Assassin’s Creed was the first game to be built on this platform, featuring climbing mechanics, challenging combat, and large beautiful levels, all of which made it stand out in 2007.
Since then, this engine has gone through a range of different updates, and all of the Assassin’s Creed titles following the original have used engines under this name. Along with this, a handful of Tom Clancy and Prince of Persia titles have also been developed using this engine. Unfortunately, this is another engine which you would need a specific job to use. This is a lofty requirement to simply try something out, though becoming a game developer could be a satisfying career change.
Notable Games: Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, Assassin’s Creed, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands
Creation Engine
Love them or hate them, Bethesda is one of the largest publishers out there, and this is a company with a long history of creating unique games with a lot of depth and creative design. Creation Engine isn’t something which has been knocking about for generations of games, though. Bethesda having previously used the Gamebryo engine. The first game to come out using the Creation Engine was Skyrim, back in 2011. Since then, only two other main titles have been made with this engine; Fallout 4 and Fallout 76.
There seems to be a pattern emerging with the engines being used by the big fish in the market, and Creation Engine is no exception. But we’ll be exploring the problems with this engine in the next section, for now, we’re going to focus on the good things which come with this platform. It is obviously quite versatile, with Skyrim being an entirely different beast to the likes of Fallout 76. It can support large maps with loads of players, complex storylines with varying paths, and a dubious physics engine which can provide endless entertainment. Yet again, we’re looking at an engine which can only be used by companies which are making games for a big publisher.
Notable Games: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Fallout 4
Innovation In Game Engines
We gamers aren’t satisfied with having the same games rammed down our throats each year, and publishers and developers alike are well aware of this (We’re looking at you Call of Duty, Battlefield et al.) This means that there is a high demand for innovation in the engine building space, and most companies are more than happy to oblige. Let’s take a look at both sides of this coin; companies which innovate, and those that don’t.
Video Game Engines Without Innovation
Before going too deep into this topic, it’s worth pointing out that developing engines is an expensive game. To put this into perspective, Amazon spent between $50 — $70 million to licence CryEngine for their Lumberyard product, rather than investing in building the tools themselves. This makes it more understandable when a company lags behind, especially when they have a slower release schedule than many of their competitors.
Bethesda’s Creation Engine is often slated for being outdated. While this isn’t necessarily true at the moment, they certainly run the risk of being left in the dust by other companies. Their current games are passable in appearance, though they lack many of the advanced graphical features which come with other titles at their price point. This isn’t a problem for a lot of die-hard fans and casual gamers, but it makes their games look cheap compared to the competition. Bethesda has also come under increased scrutiny recently as the games that have been released often ship with sometimes show-stopping bugs. Whether a problem with the engine or some mistakes in QA, this means that they could end up building a reputation for selling second-rate games?
Video Game Engines With Innovation
Innovation can come in many forms in a game engine, from simple improvements to light and shadows, to games which push the limits of the hardware available on the market. As mentioned above, improving and adding to an engine is an expensive process, and companies often have to take big financial risks to pull off their ambitions. Of course, some are less willing to take the plunge than others, and this can be seen in franchises which are very repetitive in their nature.
id Tech is no stranger to taking these kinds of challenges by the horns. 2011’s Rage is a great example of the work this company has done in the pursuit of innovation, and while the game didn’t exactly take off, the technology used for their textures is still a marvel. Each of the regions in the game used a single “megatexture”, allowing the developers to avoid repeating patterns and problems like texture pop-in. Uncompressed, the game had 1TB of textures, but the final install was only around 20GB. That’s a pretty impressive reduction considering this technology had only been around since id Tech 4, and Rage was made with id Tech 5.
Sometimes innovation comes in the form of improvements which users won’t feel, while others throw all caution to the wind, embracing every ounce of possibility. Crysis is a great example of this. When this game came out in 2007, it was one of the first games to use shaders, along with relying on DirectX 10 for rendering. Turning the game up to high settings can hurt modern computers, but the game has always been something special. Crytek worked to create a true passion project, without really taking into consideration the limitations that hardware at the time possessed, the results were a game which still looks great today.
Final Thoughts
It’s rare to find a game which has been created from the ground up nowadays. No one has time for this sort of process, and it makes a lot more sense to rely on an engine to get the job done. We hope you’ve learned a thing or two about the game development world with this article, maybe even inspired you to go and make your own game (or mod).
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