The Power Behind Video Games: A Look at Game Engines
By: Paul Buttle
Tags: Gaming, We The Players, Game Development, Video Game News, Articles

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.