Introduction

to Game Engine Architecture

Interactive Systems
Contents
Main reference: Jason Gregory, Game Engine Architecture. Second Edition,
2015.

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Contents
o Typical game team
o Game and Game engine definition
o Game genres
o Game Engine Survey

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Game Development Methodology

Concept
Design Implementation Testing Deployment
Development

Game Designers Artists, Programmers Prof. Testers Sales

Subject Matter Expert Technical Directors Beta Testers Marketing
Instructional Designer Educational
Testers

Pre-Production Production Post-Production

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Typical Game Team
o Game studio team (5 basic disciplines):
1. Engineers
2. Artists
3. Game designers
4. Producers
5. Other management and support staff
marketing, legal, information technology/technical support,
administrative, etc.

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Engineers
o Design and implement the software that makes the
game, and the tools, work
o There are two basic engineer groups:
1. Runtime programmers - who work on the engine and the
game itself
2. Tools programmers - who work on the offline tools that
allow the rest of the development team to work effectively
o Engineers have various specialties:
rendering, artificial intelligence, audio, collision and physics,
gameplay programming and scripting

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Artists
o Game industry saying: “Game is the king”
o Artists produce all of the visual and audio content in the
game. The quality of their work can make or break a
game
o Concept artists - produce sketches and paintings that
provide the team with a vision of what the final game
will look like.
o 3D modelers - produce the 3D geometry for everything
in the virtual game world. They could be foreground
modelers and background modelers.
o Texture artists - create the 2D images known as
textures, which are applied to the surfaces of 3D models
in order to provide detail and realism.

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Artists (cont)
o Lighting artists - lay out all of the light sources in the
game world, both static and dynamic, and work with
color, intensity and light direction to maximize the
artfulness and emotional impact of each scene.
o Animators - infuse the characters and objects in the
game with motion.
o Motion capture actors - provide a rough set of motion
data, which are then cleaned up and optimized by the
animators
o Sound designers - work closely with the engineers in
order to produce and mix the sound effects and music in
the game.
o Voice actors - provide the voices of the characters in
many games.
o Composers - compose an original score for the game.

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Game designers
o Design the interactive portion of the player’s experience,
typically known as gameplay
o Different levels of detail:
n Macro level - determine the story arc, the overall sequence
of chapters or levels, and the high-level goals and
objectives of the player.
n Individual levels or geographical areas within the virtual
game world - lay out the static background geometry,
determining where and when enemies will emerge, placing
supplies like weapons and health packs, designing puzzle
elements and so on.
o Game writer - range from collaborating with the senior
game designers to construct the story arc of the entire
game, to writing individual lines of dialogue.

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Producer, Other staff, Publishers
o Producers serve as liaisons between the development
team and the business unit of the company (finance,
legal, marketing, etc.).
o Other staff - supports the crucial team. Other staff
includes the studio’s executive management team, the
marketing department, administrative staff and the IT
department (purchase, install and configure hardware
and software for the team and provide technical
support).
o Publishers and Studios:
n Publisher handles the marketing, manufacture and
distribution of a game title.
n Game studio – some studios sell each game that they
produce to whichever publisher decides, or other studios
work exclusively with a single publisher company.

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Game and Game engine definition
o A game is “an interactive experience that provides the
player with an increasingly challenging sequence of
patterns which he or she learns and eventually masters”,
book “A Theory of Fun for Game Design”, by Raph Koster
o Game engine - term for software that is extensible and
can be used as the foundation for many different games
without major modification.
o The line between a game and its engine is often blurry.
Some engines make a reasonably clear distinction, while
others make almost no attempt to separate the two.

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Game engine reusability

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Game genres
1. First-Person Shooters (FPS)
2. Platformers and Other Third-Person Games
3. Fighting Games
4. Racing Games
5. Real-Time Strategy (RTS)
6. Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG)
7. Player-Authored Content
8. Other Genres

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First-Person Shooters (FPS)
o FPS aim to provide their players with the illusion of being
immersed in a detailed, hyper realistic world:
E.g. Quake, Unreal Tournament, Half-Life, Counter-Strike,
Battlefield

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FPS focusing technologies
o Efficient rendering of large 3D virtual worlds;
o A responsive camera control/aiming mechanic;
o High-fidelity animations of the player’s virtual arms and
weapons;
o A wide range of powerful handheld weaponry;
o “Floaty” feel given by the player character motion and
collision model;
o High-fidelity animations and artificial intelligence for the
non-player characters (NPCs)—the player’s enemies and
allies;
o Small-scale online multiplayer capabilities (typically
supporting up to 64 simultaneous players), and the
ubiquitous “death match” gameplay mode.

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Platformers and Other Third-Person Games
o “Platformer” - term applied to third-person character-based
action games where jumping from platform to platform is
the primary gameplay mechanic.
E.g. 2D: Space Panic, Donkey Kong, Pitfall, Super Mario
Brothers. 3D: Super Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot, Rayman 2,
Sonic the Hedgehog, Jak and Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, Super
Mario Galaxy.

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Platformer focusing technologies
o Moving platforms, ladders, ropes, trellises and other
interesting locomotion modes;
o Puzzle-like environmental elements;
o High-fidelity full-body character animations for the
player’s avatar;
o A third-person “follow camera” which stays focused on
the player character and whose rotation is typically
controlled by the human player;
o Complex camera collision system for ensuring that the
view point never goes through background geometry or
dynamic foreground objects.

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Fighting Games
o Fighting games are typically two-player games involving
humanoid characters pummeling each other in a ring of
some sort.
E.g. Soul Calibur, Tekken 3, Fight Night Round 4.

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Fighting games focusing technologies
o Rich set of fighting animations;
o Accurate hit detection;
o User input system capable of detecting complex button
and joystick combinations;
o Crowds, but static backgrounds.
o High-definition character graphics, including realistic skin
shaders with subsurface scattering and sweat effects;
o High-fidelity character animations;
o Physics-based cloth and hair simulations for the
characters.

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Racing Games
o Encompasses all games whose primary task is driving a
car or other vehicle on some kind of track
E.g. Gran Turismo, San Francisco Rush, Need for Speed,
Juiced, Mario Kart, Jak X, Freaky Flyers.

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Racing Games focusing technologies
o Various “tricks” are used when rendering distant
background elements, such as employing 2D cards for
trees, hills and mountains.
o The track is often broken down into relatively simple
two-dimensional regions called “sectors.” These data
structures are used to optimize rendering and visibility
determination, to aid in artificial intelligence.
o The camera typically follows behind the vehicle for a
third-person perspective, or is sometimes situated inside
the
o When the track involves tunnels and other “tight”
spaces, a good deal of effort is often put into ensuring
that the camera does not collide with background
geometry. cockpit first-person style.

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Real-Time Strategy (RTS)
o The player deploys the battle units in his or her arsenal
strategically across a large playing field in an attempt to
overwhelm his or her opponent.
o E.g. Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty, Warcraft,
Command & Conquer, Age of Empires, StarCraft.

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RTS focusing technologies
o Each unit is relatively low-res, so that the game can
support large numbers of them on-screen at once.
o Height-field terrain is usually the canvas upon which the
game is designed and played.
o The player is often allowed to build new structures on
the terrain in addition to deploying his or her forces.
o User interaction is typically via single-click and area-
based selection of units, plus menus or toolbars
containing commands, equipment, unit types, building
types, etc.

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Massively Multiplayer Online Games
o Massively multiplayer online game (MMOG or just MMO)
is defined as any game that supports huge numbers of
simultaneous players (103 - 105), usually all playing in
one very large, persistent virtual world (i.e., a world
whose internal state persists for very long periods of
time, far beyond that of any one player’s gameplay
session).
E.g. Guild Wars 2, EverQuest, World of Warcraft, StarWars
Galaxies, Destinity.

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Massively Multiplayer Online Games (cont)
o Very powerful battery of servers, which maintain the
authoritative state of the game world, manage users
signing in and out of the game, provide inter-user chat
or voice-over-IP (VoIP) services and more.

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Player-Authored Content
o The games encourage players to create, publish and
share their own game worlds.
o E.g. Little Big Planet, Tearaway, Minecraft

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Other game genres
o Sports, with subgenres for each major sport (football,
baseball, soccer, golf, etc.);
o Role-playing games (RPG);
o God games, e.g. Populous and Black & White;
o Environmental/social simulation games, e.g. SimCity or
The Sims ;
o Puzzle games, e.g. Tetris ;
o Conversions of non-electronic games, e.g. chess, card
games, go, etc.;
o Web-based games, e.g. those offered at Electronic Arts’
Pogo site;

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Game engine survey
o Quake Family of Engines
Games developed: Castle Wolfenstein 3D (19992), Doom,
Quake, Medal of Honor, Half-Life
o Unreal Family of Engines
Games: Unreal (1998), Unreal Tournament 2004, Gears of
War.
o Half-Life Source Engine
Games: Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal, The Orange
Box.
o Frostbite Engine
Games: Battlefield Bad Company (2006), Mass Effect,
Battlefield, Need for Speed, Dragon Age, Command &
Conquer
o CryENGINE
Games: Crysis, Codename Kingdoms, Warface, Ryse: Son
of Rome
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Game engine survey (cont)
o PhyreEngine (Sony, 2008)
Games: flOw, Flower, Journey, Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls.
o XNA Game Studio (Microsoft)
o Unity
n Powerful cross-platform game development environment
and runtime engine supporting a wide range of platforms.
n Developers can deploy their games on:
o Mobile platforms (Apple iOS, Google Android,
o Windows phone and BlackBerry 10 devices),
o Consoles (Microsoft Xbox 360 and Xbox One, Sony PlayStation
3 and PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Wii and Wii U),
o Desktop computers (Microsoft Windows, Apple Macintosh and
Linux),
o Web browsers.
Games: Deus Ex: The Fall, Chop Chop Runner, Zombieville
USA.

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Game engine survey (cont)
o 2D Game Engines for Non-programmers
n Multimedia Fusion 2
n Game Salad Creator
n Scratch
o Open Source Engines
E.g. OGRE, Panda3D, Yake, Crystal Space, Torque, Irrlicht

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