Game Engines Drive Development of Games and VR for Learning

If you’re an eLearning designer or developer who has used anauthoring tool, you’ll be familiar with some arguments for using a game engine.A game engine provides a framework for developing a game that works accordingto a set of rules. Like the templates in an authoring tool or even a wordprocessor, using this framework saves designers and developers time and effort.Why reinvent the wheel?

A game engine generally includes components that help gamedevelopers implement:

• Graphics—Game engines include a rendering element that manages creation of2-D or 3-D graphics. In a game environment, images must be rendered at highspeed to create realistic movement. The actual rendering is a series ofcomputations that the engine performs to create images based on 2-D or 3-Dmodels so that it can essentially draw objects and characters at the rightplace on the screen at the right time. A game engine might also have a hugelibrary of “assets” that make it easy to create visually detailed gameenvironments.
• Movement—A component of the game engine manages “collision detection” andthe dynamics of moving objects; this is necessary to create believable movementand interaction among characters and objects in the game environment. Thiscomponent might be called a “physics engine” because it performs the physicscalculations needed for character and object movement.
• Sounds—An audio engine is designed to play back audio without causingother components of the game, such as graphics rendering, to lag; the audioengine keeps track of which sounds are used when and gets the appropriate audioready when needed, removing it from memory when it’s no longer needed. Theengine also takes care of details like ensuring that sounds “come from” the rightplace in a game environment (e.g., bouncing off of walls, changing volume andpitch relative to where a character is), which contributes to a more realisticexperience for players.
• Networking—Multiplayer games require real-time connections among servers andcomputers; most game engines handle this in a way that creates a fun andresponsive player environment.

The engine can also perform key tasks, like managing memoryand getting rid of artifacts—such as objects or code—that are no longer neededand could tie up needed memory or slow performance. And it likely supports avariety of ways for players to interact—joysticks and other controllers thatregister movement and button presses for, say, shooting.

Many game engines are free to use. Some charge developerswho sell a certain number of units of their game or reach a certain revenuepoint; others charge for licenses or subscriptions. Game engines requiredifferent amounts of coding knowledge; some engines, like GameMaker, cater to beginners,requiring little to no programming expertise. Two popular game engines thatsupport development of VR games are Unity and Unreal Engine.

Using a game engine can speed up development, savingpotentially thousands of hours of coding, but some game developers see this as“cheating.” The engine is separate from the game content itself; that is, manygames—that are completely different in appearance, play, and tone—can bedeveloped using the same game engine. But critics say that games created on thesame engine tend to look and feel the same, even across genres.

The greatest benefit of using a game engine is saving time; developerscan focus on the content rather than the basic underlying code and scripts.Detractors argue that developers are limited by the features, scripts, andtools that are included in the engine—or have to spend time creating their ownmodifications. Both of these arguments can also be made about eLearningdeveloped using authoring tools, of course, so each developer must weigh thepros and cons of using an engine against doing in-house development.