How does engine, game make?
The term ‘engine’ is a slightly misleading one.
Talking about how X game runs Y engine tends to lead people to believe that their device (console / computer) is launching the engine, and the game is running on top of the engine.
This is where we get a lot of misinformed opinions like “this game runs bad because of X engine” or “this game would be better if they didn’t use Y engine”.
It’s not quite that simple and far more nuanced.
When we talk about an ‘engine’ what we are really talking about is a suite of tools and systems that helped develop, test, run, expand, and monitor the final product.
Then the final part of the development process is taking what the engine made and packaging it up to work on Playstation, Switch, PC etc. The consoles themselves are for the most part unaware / indifferent to what engine made the game, as the consoles have their own way of running a game and the engine creates a version to run on that console.
The best analogy I can give is a restaurant. For the most part the entire establishment is the engine, however, it’s more accurate to say the kitchen and all of its staff, tools, and ingredients is the engine. You don’t say that the pasta that arrived at your table is running on the kitchens ‘engine’.
The kitchen made it, and then you get a final product that no longer needs the engine / kitchen for you to eat it.
This is a very simplified metaphor for engines, however much of the criticism about engines is ill informed and it’s because they don’t understand this basic principle.
X game doesn’t run bad on the Playstation because the engine is bad, nor would the game be 100% better if it ran on another engine.
The game running poorly can be for a variety of reasons not related at all to the engine, and when the engine is to blame, it's normally due to other complicating factors.
Your pasta isn’t bad because the kitchen isn’t good enough to make pasta, but is most likely due to complicating factors like human error, the kitchen was far too busy, or something went wrong. Same applies to a ‘bad’ game.
I’m going to write a couple of articles on engines, mainly because I find them fascinating, and the next one, part two will delve deep into all the times it went wrong and what happened.
In this article we are going to cover the basics of what options are available to studios when they need an engine.
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