Everything You Need To Know About Game Engines

The demand for immersive 3D experiences is making its way into the office, and developers need a more efficient process to meet this growing demand, says David Brebner, founder and CEO of Umajin. 

To be a game developer, you don’t have to be a coding ninja. Game engines can do a lot of the work for you, and they have been used to build some of the most amazing and popular games available today. They do this by providing a lineup of tools and technologies for game developers to pull from to create their own games. 

This high level of development is possible because of the pre-built functions in game engines. The biggest advantage game engines offer is the ability to build high-quality content without incurring the enormous time commitment and costs necessary to build the underlying game engine from scratch. 

The desire for these immersive 3D experiences is starting to make its way into enterprise applications. Enterprise business line owners are seeing the advantages of providing teams with more compelling and immersive applications for things like training and e-learning. 

However, there’s far more that goes into enterprise application development than creating the immersive and cinematic experiences that game engines provide. The ability to integrate with enterprise data and existing systems is paramount, and the business logic layers, APIs, and data security compliance necessary for enterprise applications are not built into gaming engines. 

The prospect of building an immersive application from scratch is often a long and costly one. To facilitate a faster, more collaborative development process, enterprise teams need to embrace the value of an experience engine — a hybrid approach that combines enterprise developer tools, game engine technologies, and a low code visual editor and building blocks. 

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The Gaming Market Continues to Grow

You may be familiar with gaming engines, such as Unity Technologies, which recently filed to go public, and Unreal Engine from Epic Games, which is at the center of the lawsuit between Apple and Epic. 

Along with a few other game engines, including Cocos, CryEngine, and largely captive products such as Source and id Tech, these engines have played a central role in a game industry that has grown from $15 billion to $140 billion over the last 20 years. And the growth trajectory continues. 

A recent report from Juniper ResearchOpens a new window revealed that the video game industry’s value will exceed $200 billion in 2023 – nearly a third larger than its expected $155 billion worth in 2020. Games are no longer a niche market. In fact, games and gaming alone accounted for 8% of Microsoft’s revenue in 2020. Users love the experience, and they keep coming back for more. 

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Evolution of Gaming

Most of today’s game engines evolved out of the software tools the companies built to develop their own games. Id Software and Epic helped build the PC 3D gaming market. Id’s various engines were initially licensed to others, with a famous license being Valve for Half Life.  

However, Valve ended up developing its own unique internal engine, Source. Since then, Id’s engines have largely been a captive platform for Zenimax and now Microsoft, the new owner.  In contrasting strategies, Epic’s early game, Unreal, was eventually turned into the Unreal Engine, and it is licensed by many companies. One of the few companies to actually launch as a game engine was Unity, which was launched with an iPhone focus in 2007. 

Not surprisingly, game engines have been optimized for interactive, real-time 3D immersive content, providing lifelike experiences for game players. These platforms typically provide enablement for multi-person gaming and tools for capturing revenue, including in-app purchases and advertising. 

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Use Cases That Go Beyond Gaming

In early 2020, Mark Zuckerberg stated the following in a public letterOpens a new window : “While I expect phones to still be our primary devices through most of this decade, at some point in the 2020s, we will get breakthrough augmented reality glasses that will redefine our relationship with technology. 

“Augmented and virtual reality are about delivering a sense of presence — the feeling that you are right there with another person or in another place instead of having devices that take us away from the people around us, the next platform will help us be more present with each other and help technology get out of the way.”

Game engine developers are finding that these immersive, interactive, often 3D experiences have appeal outside of just gaming. For example, both Unity and Unreal recently started working on development projects with customers in the architecture and automotive industries. 

Due to the desire for more immersive 3D experiences, the market can expand even further into many other enterprise use cases. The unique ability to pull a person into a new or augmented reality Opens a new window greatly enhances what are currently linear experiences. 

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Gaming Engines To Experience Engines

These new use cases for immersive 3D experiences often have needs that are very different from traditional first-person games. Game engines have the potential to enable some of these use cases with interactive 3D experiences, but they also come with some limitations inherent in their heritage as development tools for first-person games. 

They have been optimized for that experience, not for efficiency, and are hence resource hogs not necessarily well suited for the lightweight, portable display devices that are more typical for enterprise use. 

They are also relatively inflexible. Although they are great for creating a rendering of a projectile on a detailed landscape, for something like training applications, they’re not necessarily flexible enough to integrate a lot of real-time data into a digital twin of a complex piece of equipment. Game engines also have a fairly significant learning curve for developers to fully utilize their capabilities. This will be an obstacle for the broader adoption of commercial and enterprise use cases.

Enter the experience engine. 

This is the term used to describe a development platform purpose-built to incorporate immersive 3D experiences into enterprise and commercial use cases. Like a game engine, it is designed to develop and render a cinematic experience across a range of devices. But it’s also designed to support a wider range of use cases without a dependency on specialized developers. 

For example, an experience engine was recently used to develop an urgent response and assistance application for large hotels and convention spaces. The app provides very accurate indoor location services, mapping, geofencing, and route optimization solutions. An experience engine has also been used to build visualization solutions for 3D medical scanners. 

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Efficiencies for Enterprise Applications

For many enterprise organizations, the development process is often executed in a monolithic fashion, with requirements gathered from many stakeholders. Over the duration of a project, the many sign-off phases and large lists of must-have features result in heavy project management requirements and long, cumbersome development cycles. 

A good experience engine will help facilitate a faster development process by providing a collaborative visual editor and modular components — all of which allow teams to create a working prototype in as little as a day or two, with the possibility of delivering a final working application within a couple of weeks. This streamlined process saves time and money — a variable that may have previously been an obstacle for development.

Unlike a game engine, an experience engine provides an extremely efficient platform for rendering 3D content and enabling users to easily incorporate enterprise, IoT, or other types of data. For training applications, the unique experience engine architecture allows complex scenarios to be authored using a simple scenario interaction tree. To further customize the training, VR or AR sessions can be edited in real-time to create additional scenarios that the team would like to experience.

As more use cases and applications seek to incorporate mixed reality and immersive 3D into the customer experience, developers will struggle to use traditional game development tools when building enterprise experiences. The DevOps implications of incorporating another siloed tool into the mix will often be frustrating and expensive.

Game engines are designed for maximum gaming output. Meanwhile, experience engines provide a bridge into the world of applications. By fusing enterprise application development and gaming technologies, users can create experiences that were not possible before.

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