Game Engine Selection Andrew Haydn Grant Technical Director MIT - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Game Engine Selection Andrew Haydn Grant Technical Director MIT - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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Game Engine Selection Andrew Haydn Grant Technical Director MIT Game Lab September 3, 2014 Fall 2014 CMS.611J/6.073 1 Games Are Software UI Back end Design/Spec/Customer Features Bugs Task lists etc. Fall 2014

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Game Engine Selection

Andrew Haydn Grant Technical Director MIT Game Lab September 3, 2014

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Games Are Software

  • UI
  • Back end
  • Design/Spec/Customer
  • Features
  • Bugs
  • Task lists
  • etc.

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Games Are Software++

  • UI must be intuitive
  • User testing
  • “Fun”
  • User testing
  • Gameplay Difficulty
  • User testing
  • Emotional Impact
  • User Testing

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Preview

  • Why Use A Game Engine?
  • Criteria For Game Engine Selection
  • Dealbreakers
  • Nice to have
  • Engines
  • The Good
  • The Nooses
  • Final Word
  • How To Learn An Engine
  • All Software Sucks
  • Engine Assignment Mechanic

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Tinker Toys vs Vision

This is what I WANT. How do I make it with these? This is what I HAVE. What can I make?

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Definition of “Hard”

“Actually, I don’t care how hard it is. How long will it take?”

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NOT Writing Code

  • Coding Is Slow
  • think
  • implement
  • debug
  • integrate
  • debug
  • debug
  • debug

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NOT Writing Code

  • Coding Is Slow
  • think
  • implement
  • debug
  • integrate
  • debug
  • So Write Less Code
  • Paper Prototyping
  • Iterative Design & Testing Early
  • Game Engines

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Why A Game Engine?

  • Time
  • Avoid reinventing the wheel
  • Avoid certain kinds of bugs
  • Define general direction of your

architecture

  • Inspiration
  • Use the feature list as a set of possibilities
  • Use the feature list as a set of limitations

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Preview

  • Why Use A Game Engine?
  • Criteria For Game Engine Selection
  • Dealbreakers
  • Nice to have
  • Engines
  • The Good
  • The Nooses
  • Final Word
  • How To Learn An Engine
  • All Software Sucks
  • Engine Assignment Mechanic

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Game Engine Selection

  • It’s an important decision
  • But don’t stress about it too much.
  • No engine is perfect.

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Preview

  • Why Use A Game Engine?
  • Criteria For Game Engine Selection
  • Dealbreakers
  • Nice to have
  • Engines
  • The Good
  • The Okay
  • The Nooses
  • Final Word
  • How To Learn An Engine
  • All Software Sucks
  • Engine Assignment Mechanic

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Primary Selection Criteria

(dealbreakers)

Cost

Free

vs

Painful

vs

Impossible

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Primary Selection Criteria

(dealbreakers)

Power: Can We Build It?

  • Fundamentals only
  • Ignore bells & whistles
  • 3d/2d
  • Publishing platform
  • Input methods
  • Other known requirements

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Primary Selection Criteria

(dealbreakers)

Ease of learning

  • Search engine friendly
  • Support community!
  • Tutorials & Documentation
  • Support community!
  • In-house experts?
  • A person knowing the engine is only useful if that person WELCOMES being a teacher.
  • Learning Curve

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Primary Selection Criteria

(dealbreakers)

Ease of Use

  • Strongly Typed Programming Language
  • Compile-time error detection
  • Free Communication Channels
  • Auto-complete code editor
  • Easier Integration

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Close Enough

If you know one, you know the others:

  • Java
  • C#
  • AS3
  • Haxe

Extra bonus:

  • C++

If you know this, you know all of the above.

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Not Close Enough

Java != Javascript

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Primary Selection Criteria

(dealbreakers)

Ease of Use

  • Source control friendly?
  • Debugging?

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Primary Selection Criteria

(dealbreakers)

Robust Product

  • Few bugs
  • Hard to analyze quickly
  • Cues:
  • Strong Community
  • Large Community

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Preview

  • Why Use A Game Engine?
  • Criteria For Game Engine Selection
  • Dealbreakers
  • Nice to have
  • Engines
  • The Good
  • The Nooses
  • Final Word
  • How To Learn An Engine
  • All Software Sucks
  • Engine Assignment Mechanic

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Secondary Selection Criteria

(nice to have)

Ease of Use

  • Asset pipeline
  • Source Code Available?
  • Code IDE?
  • World Editor?
  • Profiling?

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Secondary Selection Criteria

(meh)

Power: Bells And Whistles

  • Rendering Speed
  • Pathfinding
  • Physics
  • Shaders
  • Shadows
  • Particle Systems

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Criteria I Don't Use

  • Scripting Languages
  • Beautiful Games

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Preview

  • Why Use A Game Engine?
  • Criteria For Game Engine Selection Dealbreakers
  • Nice to have
  • Engines
  • The Good
  • The Nooses
  • Final Word
  • How To Learn An Engine
  • All Software Sucks
  • Engine Assignment Mechanic

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Why Flixel?

  • Free
  • Publishes to web in Flash
  • Robust
  • IDE
  • All source visible
  • Strongly typed language
  • Simple object oriented architecture
  • Excellent for 2d sprite-based

Action

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Learning Curve: Flixel

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Why Not Flixel?

  • Not so good at heavy GUI work
  • Falling usage
  • Adobe is insane

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Why Unity?

  • Free
  • Publishes to web
  • Excellent Community
  • Robust
  • IDE
  • Excellent Asset Pipeline
  • Strongly typed language
  • and two weakly typed ones
  • Harder to learn than Flixel, but easier than almost

everything else

  • Simple, but unusual component-based architecture

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Why Not Unity?

  • 3D
  • Source Control/Merge
  • Not so good at heavy GUI work

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Preview

  • Why Use A Game Engine?
  • Criteria For Game Engine Selection
  • Dealbreakers
  • Nice to have
  • Engines
  • The Good
  • The Nooses
  • Final Word
  • How To Learn An Engine
  • All Software Sucks
  • Engine Assignment Mechanic

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Nooses

  • Haxe Flixel
  • AS3, Flash pedigree
  • Flixel Pedigree
  • Untried
  • Phaser
  • Education Arcade
  • Javascript
  • bleah- use Typescript!
  • Untried

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Learning A Game Engine

  • Start with a tutorial
  • Try something very small
  • Skim the docs
  • Try something harder

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All Software Sucks

But we still use it.

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Analysis Assignment

  • You can trade game engines.
  • Spend no more than 4 hours learning your game engine.
  • If you finish the tutorials, start making an Asteroids or

Space Invaders clone.

  • Bring your experiences to class Wednesday (Sept 10)
  • … and a development machine!

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Game Engine Selection

Andrew Haydn Grant Technical Director MIT Game Lab September 3, 2014

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MIT OpenCourseWare http://ocw.mit.edu

CMS.611J / 6.073 Creating Video Games

Fall 2014 For information about citing these materials or our Terms of Use, visit: http://ocw.mit.edu/terms.