The decision of producing with or without a game engine can have major effects on the game, team and company. Large risks can be made with large rewards afterwards, or game plans can fail miserably by making the wrong choice.
In order to maintain a competitive edge in the game industry, it is important to continually research new video game techniques and technologies. It is not enough to simply be aware of emerging techniques and technologies but also to make informed decisions about which of these techniques are appropriate given a particular project’s requirements and limitations.
At Jagaco we made the choice to build our own technology. We build the engine from the ground up and surround the engine with tooling to make life easier for the artists. For the tooling you can think of a level editor, animation editor, bin packing tools to create spritesheets and our own asset pipeline (a separate post will dig into more details about the asset pipeline).
There are a few reasons why we made the choice to build our own engine.
- Because we can
- Because it is fun
- Extra monetization possibilities
- Custom tech to fit our needs perfectly
The first two reasons are personal, and that is what you see a lot when it comes to these kind of choices. The programmers in the team must be able and capable to cope with a task as large as making your own engine, it is a big commitment in time and the risk is greater because the technology isn’t field tested by a large user base (in contrast to commercially available engines). The third option is a business choice, the extra risk of building your own engine can in turn pay back if the technology is mature enough to be used by others. The last reason is the most common one to make your own engine, everything fits perfectly to your needs and you can change and elaborate on the technology as much as you want. One of the things to be aware of is the “Not invented here” syndrome which something almost all programmers suffer from. I very much like to build stuff myself, mostly because it is fun and because of the learning experience it gives you. But the choice to build everything yourself is not always the best choice commercially.
Research
Very little research is done in this field (mainly because the gaming industry hasn’t been researched that much yet). Because of the lack of research I have written a paper for one of my master courses (besides having a full-time job and owning a game company, I also somehow find time to do a MSc study at a university halfway across the country). In this paper I will consider several factors that influence the choices regarding technologies to be applied in a game project. These choices include whether the project should use existing game engine technology or whether the game engine technology should be developed in-house. The conducted case study is too small to draw any fundamental conclusions, but some preliminary conclusions are found.
You can find the whole paper here. The two companies surveyed in the paper are anonymized, but I will let you in on a little secret: RB from JG is our own Remco from Jagaco Games.
I would love to hear what you think of the paper in the comments.
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