How Game Engines Work!

game engines if you follow games you've probably heard about game engines all the time especially in game trailers trying to hype up their tech or with all the beautiful unreal engine 4 graphics floating around the internet lately but seriously can we just take a moment and look at how beautiful these are just wow we hear a lot about advanced engines creating hyper realistic aaa games but what do they really do does a better engine make a better game and how could we make one let's find out a game engine is a framework for game development this framework helps us with several core areas that all games have for now we'll simplify it to just three graphics audio and logic actually these are things that all software has whether you're making the latest aaa shooter tetris or a calculator app however modern game engines have become more specialized and commonly include frameworks for physics ai networking optimization and much more but what do i mean by a framework and how does it help let's take a look at history back in the day nearly every game was made from scratch for example let's say we're making super mario brothers for the nes and we just got the design sheet from miyamoto and we're trying to load the graphics in the right places looking here we have the floor some pipes some goombas the blocks coins we have a lot of objects in this first level and we have to tell the nes to get these sprites from the cartridge memory and show them at the coordinates that we want them to be at and once we're finished with this we then have to delete each and every one of these objects to make room in memory for the next area so we have to make sure every time we create a new object we also find and delete every goomba coin and block one by one now this would be a lot easier if we had a system that could keep track of these objects and automatically free them once the next level starts to load creating this system will require more memory but it will also save a lot of development time which is a trade-off we might want to take you might notice that every game has objects and characters and enemies right so it would be great if this memory management system could be made so it can function in any game not just one so that whether you're making mario mega man or zelda you don't have to keep writing the same code every single time and this is what i mean by a game engine being a framework it provides tools and structure that every game requires to function using engines means you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you start a new project while modern games are able to handle the overhead of many complex systems in reality most old school games were not able to take that trade off since memory was so limited and precious third party engines only became widespread once 3d games were in demand and as technologies grew increasingly complicated many studios began to use these engines to speed up the development process although many still make their own in-house engines from scratch even today once again there is a trade-off here making your own engine allows you to optimize specifically for your game but buying one will save you possibly thousands of hours of coding time so let's take a look at some of these engines to see what they actually do how they're different and how they influence games first up is game maker which is so simple that i actually used it to make pong at a science camp when i was about 12. people have made some wonderful and interesting projects with this because you don't have to write code although you will naturally understand a programmer's mindset as you learn game logic for example to make a simple platformer and game maker you need to understand that when the player presses spacebar the block should jump but you don't need to understand why things jump in a parabola or how the block is being animated there are some clear limitations since you have to play by game maker's rigid rules but projects like to the moon show that creativity and talent can always shine through the tech next is unreal engine 4 an incredibly robust professional level tool that recently became completely free to use ue 3 had hits like arkham city and bioshock infinite and unreal 4 shows a lot of promise as well you will notice that it looks quite a bit more complicated than game maker and you can see why developers need more advanced software like this to keep track of complex 3d environments lots of modern engines will support the cool lighting effects and realistic explosions and other boring things like memory management but there are two things i really like about unreal specifically first the blueprint system learning to make games with this will make a professional engine seem almost like game maker you can get some pretty cool games running quickly without ever writing code the other thing i like about it is that if you really want to optimize down to the last byte and have complete control over the code subscribers can have access to all of unreal's source code to modify it to their heart's content i love its accessibility to both aaa studios and game dev hobbyists alike finally we have unity which has become very well known for being the source of many steam green light flops along with some really wonderful titles like pillars of eternity ori in the blind forest and kerbal space program nonetheless there is a lot of talk about its more unsavory titles i personally believe that a lot of unity shovelware exists simply because it has always been free and simple it supports higher level languages like c-sharp and javascript and has many tools that allows developers to bypass coding altogether unity has also accumulated a bustling community with tons of free tutorials assets and content making it many young creators first engine i personally started with unity before unreal so i'm more fluent in it meaning i'm able to sketch out game ideas way more quickly and i'm able to create a lot of content in a short time similarly all of these low barriers to entry result in a huge number of gaming projects in the world at large of which only a certain percentage will be legitimately good this is probability's fault not unities in any case all of these are wonderful tools that help you make games everything i mentioned here has an excellent free version that you can download right now so if you've always wanted to try making games you can pull up a tutorial and start making one in only a few hours so now we have a basic idea of what engines do and how they might affect games differently but could we make one of course we can so look out for tutorials on how to make a game engine from scratch in c plus in the upcoming weeks as always everyone is welcome to try regardless of experience but this is an excellent exercise in understanding how games work down to the last bite also check out our community game you get 24 hours to make a contribution to a unity project once again all levels of experience are welcome even if you've never made a game before all the information is in the description below and as always thank you so much for watching this is so much fun have a happy day wherever you are i'll see you guys next time bye

Channel: TheHappieCat

Views: 1,879,806

Rating: 4.8526893 out of 5

Keywords: Game Engine (Software Genre), Shooter Game (Media Genre), Video Game (Industry)

Id: DKrdLKetBZE

Length: 8min 22sec (502 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 07 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/xenago]

This is more of an overview of what a game engine does rather than how it works, but it's still really good