GAME ENGINES: DESIGNING GAMES EFFICIENTLY
Gaming is a major solution for all the boredom. Most of us resort to games in deserted situations, stress, monotonous day, and the like. But do you know how these games are built that come to our rescue?
Well, if you know about the gaming industry- you must have heard of GAME ENGINES. Game engines are the basic step towards building a game. Let’s dwell on the minor and major understanding and functioning of a Game Engine.
DEFINING GAME ENGINES
Game Engines are one of the crucial tools for game developers. What do game engines do then? Similar to laying a plot, deciding story, and defining characters before writing a book, Game engines provide a basic ground to start building your game.
Unity 3D online defines Game engines as, “A game engine is a software that provides game creators with the necessary set of features to build games quickly and efficiently.
A game engine is a framework for game development that supports and brings together several core areas. You can import art and assets, 2D and 3D, from other software, such as Maya or 3s Max or Photoshop; assemble those assets into scenes and environments; add lighting, audio, special effects, physics and animation, interactivity, and gameplay logic; and edit, debug and optimize the content for your target platforms.”
FUNCTIONALITY OF GAME ENGINES
Game engines, thus, can deal providing gaming features from animation to artificial intelligence. After laying a software framework, a game engine is responsible for functions like graphic rendering, animation systems, physics, networking, sound and Artificial Intelligence.
Graphic Rendering
Graphic rendering is a process where the game engine generates animated 3D graphics. The scene, texture, lighting, shading, etc all of these graphics are rendered into images for the users to view it as images. Culling methods help ease out graphic rendering in game engines.
Unity3D online says, “For most games, game engines can provide you with architecture with overall high-performance rendering capabilities, and with access to fast graphics API, so you can enable the greatest visual fidelity for your games.”
Animation Systems
After graphic rendering, animation systems help n rendering animations of a game. Animation systems like inverse kinematics, particle systems, forward kinematics, and path-based animation render game animations.
Physics
According to Unity 3D, “The Physics system in a game engine provides you with the components that handle physical simulation for you. You don’t have to do all the hard coding by yourself, neither code every move created in the scene by the game elements or collisions between your game components. Game engines enable you to create objects that can behave in a realistic way with just a few lines of code.”
Networking
Networking in a game engine is a way to connect to fellow and other gamers around the world. It helps players play/battle in games with each other. Unity 3D mentions, “For a specific type of game, networking requires a lot of server power which can result in a lot of complex workflows and processes. Luckily, a lot of the game engines have workflows, scriptable components, and APIs in place that you can optimize however you want to for online and multiplayer.”
Audio
Audio is one of the key features of game engines. It allows various sounds to be chosen by a developer for his/her game. “Game engines can help you integrate those sound natively, or through third-party apps, so you can focus on the composition of sounds and placing the sounds creatively in the context of game scenes, as well as assigning sounds to events in a way that suits your vision,” asserts Unity 3D.
Artificial Intelligence
AI is usually an outsourced component in game engines. Every game design has a uniquely specific AI build for its players. It adds logic and behaviour to your game. Depending upon the AI, the game responds to the unpredictable actions of the user and takes different decisions. According to Unity, “With pre-build scripts, a solution provided by some game engines, you can easily control the camera, the relationship between your game elements, and the animation system which can be used to control character animation.”
GAME ENGINE APPLICATIONS
Few famous Game engine applications are:
Unity
Unity- developed by Unity Technologies and release in 2005- was initially an OS X titles exclusive platform. Game designing organization online says, “Unity is a very versatile engine and is turning out to be a staple for mobile developers…(it) includes a user interface and tools that are very accessible to people who perhaps aren’t as well-versed in game design… Unity has a great cross-platform base and is accessible over 25 different platforms. The accessibility alone should be attractive to those with an open goal of game design.”
Initially an exclusive platform, Unity is now used as cross-platform today. The game engine has made users launch famous games like ‘animal crossing,’ ‘Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft,’ ‘Rust,’ ‘Temple Run,’ and many more.
Unreal Engine
The game engine is extremely user-friendly. According to The Tool online, Unreal Engine “allows you to make changes and modify your game with no need for programming or changing codes.” The engine also lets you test your game inside the platform. The engine software can help you design impressive 3D graphics. The engine supports platforms like iOS, Mac OS X, Linux, HTML 5, Windows PC, Sony PlayStation 4, Android, Xbox One, VR platforms, and SteamOS.
Construct 2
Katie Greene, author on Game Analytics online says, “Construct 2 is quite a powerful little engine that was designed specifically for 2D-based HTML5 games. A little bit similar to Flowlab, Construct 2 utilizes a WYSIWYG drag-and-drop interface for game creation. It comes with a bunch of plug-ins, visual effects, and other resources so that you can start creating a game right out of the box, and honestly, creation of a simple platformer title takes maybe 2 hours tops, if you have all of your resources ready.”
Buildbox
BuildBox is considered one of the fastest game engines. It is simple to create games on BuildBox as it involves a minimal amount of coding. It is one of the great game engines for beginners. A user can just drag and drop assets into its games and attribute properties to its assets and can also test them in real-time. One of the famous games, Color Switch, which made over 200 million downloads was created on BuildBox in a week. It can be run on either iOS or Windows 7.
GameMaker Studio 2
GameMaker Studios is a great software for beginners. The software has its own programming language called ‘Game Maker Language.’ Greene says, “it offers a great visual studio, with in-app editing for graphics, levels, models, etc. So if you want to create everything from scratch inside the same engine with no 3rd party tools, GM:S is a choice candidate — but as far as scripting support, the native “Game Maker Language” isn’t as fast as a compiled language like C++.
EXPERTS’ VIEWS
It’s a truism in the game industry that a well-designed game should be playable immediately, with no instruction whatsoever.
- Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
It should be the experience, that is touching. What I strive for is to make the person playing the game the director.
- Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario
CONCLUSION
Thus, simply, a game engine does tasks that are common to game developers (for example developer, artists, designer, animator, scripter, etc.) It predefines a few features so as to let the game developers dwell on the uniqueness of the game.
A game engine could really ease out on developing games. It smoothly and meticulously defines each and every component of a game. What are you waiting for then? Let’s create a game together!
COMPELLING. ISN’T IT?
RELATED ARTICLES
To read more articles click here
