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ysaie
@ysaie

"game engine" is a really vague term that can be a lot of different things

  • UE5 is a game engine. it has thousands and thousands and thousands of lines of code written over 25+ years, a considerable portion of which is auxiliary tooling, custom core data types, and editor UI. it costs million and millions of dollars and hundreds of people's time to make a UE5.
  • love2d is a game engine. it's basically a Lua binding to SDL and a handful of other libraries. it's the result of a bit over a decade of continuous work by (iirc) a couple dozen volunteers.
  • the shitty web-based game maker clone i made for my first job is a game engine. it runs in-browser and uses the Canvas API for everything, except the editor, which is a big steaming pile of jQuery. i made it in a haze over a weekend because my boss at the time said he'd pay me $3k if he could demo it to some people on monday and i needed rent money.
  • the window.c library i made when i was 16 is a game engine. it only works on Fedora 12 and only one game was ever made with it: the Pong clone i made immediately after writing it. it took me a month and it's still one of my proudest programming achievements.

it can be very hard or very easy to make a game engine. it just depends what hardware/software platforms you want it to run on, what platform and language you use to implement it, how generic it is, what libraries you use to help you, how performant you want it to be, how many and what kinds of asset pipelines you support, etc. if it's infrastructural software written for the purpose of making games, it's probably a game engine (or at least part of a game engine).


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