What Is a Game Engine? - DTNS WEEKEND

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2:27Matthew Stevens: Welcome to a Daily Tech News Show weekend edition. I'm Tom Merritt. And this time we are answering a question we've gotten from a few people about what a game engine is. If you've heard about Unity or other game engines, you may have a kind of a concept, you may have an idea. But Matthew Stevens agreed to come on and explain it to us. Matthew, Thanks for joining us.

2:50GadgetVirtuoso: Absolutely. Happy to be here.

2:51Matthew Stevens: Tell the folks a little bit about your experience in the gaming world and development and where you come from.

2:58GadgetVirtuoso: Sure. So more than a decade, I worked at a mobile game studio. It was based in Dallas pre-pandemic, and then we all went virtual, you know, as everybody does. So, but anyway, I just, all of the IT things that you can need. So my side of things was more of an admin side of things, but that meant I also had to do a lot of things with Unity and licensing and doing that in Jenkins, you know, continuous improvement, back-end build type things. And so even though I wasn't a programmer, I still had to learn quite a bit of things about how Unity works and how it functions and make all the things work properly so that, you know, everybody can do the jobs that they needed to do and how to, you know, deploy that software and everything like that.

3:45GadgetVirtuoso: So So I didn't use Unity on a daily basis, but got a lot of experience in how Unity works and the ins and outs of what it does.

3:56Matthew Stevens: Yeah. So you weren't taking advantage of the game engine, but you were making sure other people could. So you needed to know how it works, sounds like.

4:03GadgetVirtuoso: Right. Yeah, definitely how it works, you know, ins and outs of it, licensing for Unity over the years. And Unity's definitely gotten a lot better with licensing and things like that. So, you know, setting up headless machines, you know, so they can build them automatically in the background and things like that. So there's a lot of things that need to happen in order for all of those things to work properly and make the games. Yeah. Yeah.

4:29Matthew Stevens: And there are multiple game engines. There's Unreal. There's Unity. There's others. And often when they're in the news, they're in the news for licensing, you know, for changes in their licensing terms or their rates or whatever. But a lot of people don't know what it is. What exactly is a game engine?

4:46GadgetVirtuoso: Well, a computer doesn't know anything about physics. So how do you teach a computer about physics? You know, what is up, what is down, what is left, what is right, what is forward, backwards, all of the things. Okay, well, that's just the very beginning of physics. You know, how do things react when I bump into a wall if you're in a video game? And how do – I've been playing a lot of Mario Kart World recently. So, you know, how does your cart go and, you know, how does it decide that it's going to fly when it hits this object? Well, something has to tell the program because a computer game is just a program and it has to tell it, you know, how do those things interact?

5:28GadgetVirtuoso: You know, if you have a mushroom, you get to go faster. You know, maybe you're not as limited by speed or, you know, you have a star. You're impervious to all of the things that you're talking about. So if you get hit with a turtle shell, it doesn't do anything. But normally, what does it do? It knocks you off the game. You know, you lose momentum or, you know, you're flying. You know, what does that mean? Do you have control? How much control do you have? You know, how does the weight of your cart matter? If so, how much does it matter? Does your character matter? Does all of those things are physics?

6:06GadgetVirtuoso: and you have to tell the computer, what do I do with the physics of the game? So, yeah.

6:14Matthew Stevens: So if I have it right, the game engine is there to make the developers' life easier so they don't have to reinvent physics every time they write a program. Is that right?

6:22GadgetVirtuoso: Exactly, exactly right. I mean, how do you program physics? And so some of the bigger studios, they don't like the licensing model of Unity or Unreal or something, and they'll do their own. Well, if you're doing your own, then you have to have a whole team of people to write the code that does the thing that Unity and Unreal do. And so that's not a cheap process. That's one of the reasons video games are so expensive is because Unity is very expensive and it's licensed depending on what you buy. So when we're talking about licensing, you have just Unity and then you want, okay, I'm going to build for iOS.

7:02GadgetVirtuoso: Well, then you buy the plugin for iOS. Oh, I'm going to build on Android. Then I'm going to buy the Android plugin. Well, I want to build on Xbox or Nintendo or PlayStation or PC or whatever you're doing. And it's like, okay, well, I'm going to buy the plugins for those things. You don't have to buy all of them. And you're just buying Unity doesn't mean you can develop for Xbox. There's an Xbox plugin that you buy. And then that kind of gives you some of the ability to program for those different platforms. It kind of gives you the ins and outs, brings in some of the APIs, the application programming layers, the interfaces that you want to use in each of the different platforms.

7:48And gives the developers and artists, because there's a lot of art that goes into a video game.

7:55GadgetVirtuoso: you would that's one of the reasons it's also very expensive when you're looking at a video game that's brought up in unity you get to see behind the scenes you get to see the things that are 2d and 3d and like a lot of the backgrounds are really just 2d and you can kind of see where they are and some of them kind of blend off into the edges but you just don't get your your your view that you normally look when you're looking at your on your iphone or your android device your tv it's a very different view and you can see all the ways that it interacts and there's just a lot of intricacies behind the scenes that you don't ever get to see

8:33Matthew Stevens: in the video game when you're playing episode prep gets messy when research slack threads and script trackers are all in different places that's where chat gpt work comes in give it the goal and connect to the tools where work happens like apps and files and it can help pull the pieces into a draft you can review without you having to re-explain the project at every step. For example, ChatGPT work can gather team feedback from Slack and use it to suggest updates to a project brief in Google Docs. You stay in control reviewing the draft and deciding what moves forward. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects.

9:10Matthew Stevens: Get started at ChatGPT.com by selecting work mode. Available on Plus and Pro plans. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Morning Brew Daily breaks down the biggest news in business every morning so it fits seamlessly in your day.

9:55Matthew Stevens: I'm Toby Howell. And I'm Neil Freiman. And each morning we cover everything from the latest tech headlines to why nobody can afford a house right now. You'll leave each episode of Morning Brew Daily smarter and ready to take on the world around you. And some people are saying it's the best part of their morning. Because we know something you don't. Business news doesn't have to be boring. Join millions of monthly listeners and check out Morning Brew Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Back to school is busy enough. The last thing you need is shopping that makes it harder. Whether you're moving into a dorm, your first apartment, or just getting organized for the semester, Wayfair makes it easy to get everything you need in one place.

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11:23Matthew Stevens: so you're paying unity or unreal or whoever uh whoever's game engine you're using uh so that you don't have to build it and maintain it yourself and that's why you pay for the add-ons it's like makes it easier to to plug into whatever platform you're developing for uh right what do the developers do with the game engine uh it sounds from what you've said so far that you know they'll plug in the art, they'll say, oh, this object is solid. This object is not, you know, but, but give us a little more on that, that side of things. Like what is the developer using it for?

11:56GadgetVirtuoso: Well, the developer still has to give it the characteristics for the object. So the object is you put in the object and it's a piece of art. Okay. Well, that art asset, what does it do? What, how does it interact with the thing? You know, so there's still a lot of programming to that, you know, do we want it? How long is it going to last? You know, does it give us a characteristic for this, that, or the other thing, whatever, whatever your desire is. But all of that is very, is very fluid. It's very dynamic. And it still requires a lot of programming because you still have programming behind the scenes.

12:32GadgetVirtuoso: Like, okay, so you, you get the star, maybe you bought something and I, you bought an in-app purchase. And then it's like, okay, well then you have, you've unlocked that thing. There's code that goes into that to say, I'm going to give you that thing because the program is like, oh, well, that's unlocked for this user, but only for five times. Yeah.

12:51Matthew Stevens: The engine knows how the thing behaves. The program says whether you have it or not, I guess. Right.

12:56GadgetVirtuoso: Right. Yeah. So there's, there's a lot of interactions between that. And, and what does that, is that object solid? Is it just there for to look pretty or does, does it actually have substance to it? You know, there's a, there's a lot of things like when you're playing Mario Kart, for example, you know, you can, you can fly through plants well somebody had to program that the plants aren't physical maybe they slow you down a little bit but maybe they but they're not a wall and when you hit a wall you can't go any farther and well somebody had to program that wall says this is a hard boundary but sometimes you have areas where you can go if you have a mushroom so you can have the power up to go through the go through that or you can jump on the wall or you know all of those interactions Somebody has to program and decide what those things are going to do.

13:47GadgetVirtuoso: And it's just very time-consuming because you have to interact with each object that you're programming at each specific point. And so the game engine does a lot of the heavy lifting for you so you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you're trying to decide every scene that you're trying to do. And it becomes assets at that point. And then you can reuse some of those things sometimes. And sometimes you can't. You got to redevelop them a little bit or reconfigure them. Yeah.

14:16Matthew Stevens: So, and the engine is like, I can tell you how a hard wall behaves, how an impenetrable wall behaves or how something transparent behaves. But you have to tell the game engine which things are which as you're going around. That makes sense.

14:30GadgetVirtuoso: Yeah. You have to totally define that. You see, you could have walls could be different things. You know, let's say you had an ability, you know, maybe you got like some sort of special ability that walls weren't hard. they were rubber and in that moment like when you hit the wall it's like okay if i have this thing the wall isn't rubber it just bounces you back yeah somebody has to program that functionality and how much does it bounce you back does is it a lot is it a little bit is it you know is it what you run into the wall is it a wall that kills you or is it a wall that just kind of stuns you or or do you just fall backwards or you know what what is the relatively different nature Like you're talking about like Donkey Kong, you play Donkey Kong, you touch the vines and that's critical damage.

15:16Matthew Stevens: Yeah. The programmer decided that the vines were critical damage. The engine told the vines how to behave because of that.

15:24GadgetVirtuoso: Right. Yeah, basically. Right. And there's different kinds of vines, you know, so you have some vines you can walk on. You have some vines that are critical damage and some vines. It hurts you a little bit, but it doesn't kill you. And, you know, how many times you hit that and the programming is like, okay, well, we got to keep track of the life force that this character has. And how much damage does that vine give Donkey Kong each time you touch it? That has to be programmed into the game. And so there's a lot of intricacies that go into that. And so mobile gaming, it doesn't really matter if it's mobile gaming or Xbox or PlayStation or whatever.

16:01GadgetVirtuoso: The fundamentals are basically the same. You're just talking about bigger and bigger projects. So if you're working with a AAA title, you may have thousands of artists because you're looking at that game and everything you see, somebody had to draw and make look real or however it looks. Somebody had to develop that art. And then, okay, then somebody else had to go back and program. What does that thing do? Is it, does it, does it have interaction inability in the game or does it not? You know, it's, there's a wide variety of things, but everything has to be programmed. Some of it can be done in mass.

16:42GadgetVirtuoso: Some of it can be done more manually. And it just depends on how your game, how involved your game is and what you're going to do. Does it have touch points? Does it need to interact with a mouse? Does it interact with a game controller? You know, how many buttons do you have? What are the buttons do in your game? all of that is programmed in into the game engine the game engine helps you do all of those things much quicker some of it's in ui some of it's in programming language where you actually have to tell it you know how it's going to behave and and things like that or if you buy something you know you find a chest you know what does that give you how do you program all of that and control all of those things that you got in your in your in your chest when you were discovering you know lost treasure in your pirate game or whatever the case may be yeah like

17:33Matthew Stevens: the game engine is going to tell you how the chest swings open and and all of that you're going to decide what it looks like and what's in it and how it sounds right and i mean like the animation for

17:44GadgetVirtuoso: that that may be done in like blender or it may be done in adobe premiere or something like that and then those art assets are imported into the game and then it's like well how does that interact with the character when it opens. Does it hit the character in the head because he's too close? And then you get some sort of effect when that happens. And when that effect happens, did the artist add the stars above the head so they're doing all of the things? So every little detail has to be programmed. There has to be art for that. There has to be something for that. And there's a lot of... There's even plugins for Unity itself.

18:25GadgetVirtuoso: Like, so when somebody, so you don't have to, if your character runs into the wall and you get like a sound or you get a special effect, there's a plugin for that. That just does, they, they gives you the sound and that moment. So you don't have to program that every single time, or it gives you like the, the, the shining, the shine sound or something like whatever you get the star. There's a, there was, they probably developed a plugin. So when you get the star, it changes the character to make it look like this applies this effect to a character rather than having to program that for each scene or each in each way that it's doing that so yeah

19:03Matthew Stevens: so that that really helps clear up like what an engine is what it does how the developers use it um what effect does it have on me as a game player or or does it i hear sometimes people say they prefer games made on one engine or another um does it really matter i don't know

19:24GadgetVirtuoso: that it does you know um everybody has like their preferences you know like their screen refresh rates you know and yeah does it have do they have image tearing or any or things like that you know it's and and people can get really particular about that and and i'm not one that has ever really cared too much about that kind of thing but if you i guess if you really care if the details really matter there can be some there but i i think that really comes down to how it's implemented so if a if a game is done well you probably don't even notice which game engine was was used and off the top of my head i don't i couldn't even tell you unless and you probably don't even know unless you see like the splash screen that says designed on unity and they did that so that they could get a discount on the licensing so it wasn't it it wasn't that they needed to show that it was done on unity they just did that because the contract that they signed with unity says if we do this then we get a little bit of a discount on our licensing for our game engine or something like that so um and there's a lot of variables that go into the licensing and negotiations for that uh but basically i don't really think it matters that much in the end in the end um you know people will say that it will but you know you and i both know that sometimes people just kind of get really hung up on those ideas.

20:47GadgetVirtuoso: And in the end, I don't really think it matters that much. Yeah.

20:53Matthew Stevens: Yeah, it's just brand loyalty at some point. Maybe, yeah. Because developers have to do so much that can affect the game, it makes sense to me that it would really be more on the development side and less on the engine side that's determining whether you enjoy a game or not.

21:12GadgetVirtuoso: Probably so. Yeah, I think it's just a lot of the people that are just, you know, a developer that's had a lot of Unity experience might have trouble going over to an Unreal studio and vice versa. Those platforms have, I'm sure, have wildly different characteristics and programming behaviors. Or maybe they don't. I've not worked for an Unreal studio. It was always a Unity studio.

21:38Matthew Stevens: It makes sense that different things are going to work slightly different and maybe catch up really fast. But yeah, there's always going to be those little quirks. Matthew, thanks so much for helping explain this to us today. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. If folks want to hire you or find more of what you do, where should they go?

21:56GadgetVirtuoso: Yeah. So as we talked about before this little episode, yeah, I'm currently unemployed. So, you know, you can find me on LinkedIn, Matthew J. Stevens, based out of Dallas, Texas. I'm currently in Ecuador right now. My name is Ecuadorian. So we spend time here a lot sometimes. And, you know, cost of living is cheaper here. So while you're unemployed, that makes the money go a little bit further. So that's a little nicer. Nice. I had no idea.

22:24Matthew Stevens: That's so cool.

22:25GadgetVirtuoso: Yeah. Gadget Virtuoso on just about all of the things. So if you find me on all of the interwebs and all the social platforms there. But, you know, always LinkedIn for sure.

22:37Matthew Stevens: Excellent. Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso. Thanks again for helping us understand game engines. Folks, thank you for making the show possible. Patreon.com slash DTNS. And we'll be back to talk about the news on Monday. See you then.

23:02GadgetVirtuoso: The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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