Game engine

How it is used

Used constantly in job ads, studio meetings and tutorials. Well-known examples are Unity, Unreal Engine and Godot; large studios often have an in-house engine. You choose, build on, license or switch engines.

Example sentences

1. We're prototyping in Godot first, then we'll decide whether to move to a bigger game engine.

2. The studio built its own game engine because no commercial one handled huge crowds well.

Common collocations

• choose a game engine
• in-house engine
• engine license
• switch engines

Related terms

• game loopThe code cycle at the heart of every game that runs many times per second: read the player's input, update the game world, then draw the new frame.
• physics engineThe system that simulates real-world physics in a game, such as gravity, collisions, friction and forces, so objects fall, bounce and push each other believably.
• renderingThe process in which the computer turns a 3D or 2D scene, with its models, textures and lights, into the final image shown on the screen.
• scriptA piece of code that controls how something in the game behaves, such as a door that opens, an enemy that patrols or a quest that starts, usually attached to objects in the engine.
• assetAny piece of content used in a game, such as a 3D model, texture, sound effect, animation or music track, usually stored as a file and imported into the engine.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• game engine · Software Engineering

More terms: Game Engines & Tools

• scene
• prefab
• profiler
• component