We present the most powerful and accessible video game development engines.
Video games are fun, we all know by now. But almost everyone who enjoys them is unaware that the process of creating them is just as fun (and in some cases more than playing the games themselves), although there are always difficult and a little frustrating moments. A couple of decades ago the process of creating them was very complex: you had to know C ++ perfectly and some API like DirectX or OpenGL. At present, the process has become much more simple, accessible to people with all kinds of programming knowledge or even, in a couple of cases, without knowing anything. If you have ever been bitten by the urge to create something however small and simple it is, let's make it easy for you to know the most appropriate tool for each case.
Unreal Engine
Unreal Engine
The heavy weight of the game engines. If an AAA game development studio does not have its own engine such as EA or Ubisoft it is more than likely that they use Unreal Engine. The first version we saw in the year 98, with the release of Unreal 1 on PC, and already made it clear that it was an engine that we would have to follow closely, because it already took advantage of the hardware in the 3DFX era. Street Fighter V, Ace Combat 7, Abzu, Darksiders III or Dragon Ball Fighter Z are some of the games made with this engine, but the list is much wider and with a level of quality whose average is through the roof.
Unlike Unity, another giants of the sector, Unreal focuses on C ++ and maybe that's why the performance has always been better than the competition. Share with your most direct rival the possibility of buying plugins from an online catalog that can be added to the engine and quickly get results. Like Unity, we can export our games on any platform we want, from Web to mobile, via PC / MAC or consoles.
Unity
Unity
It is, without doubt, one of the most famous has gained over the past few years among indie developers. With this little gem titles of the likes of Cuphead, Monument Valley 2, Inside, Ori and the Blind Forest or Hearthstone have been created. Its launch took place more than 15 years ago, in principle only for MAC, and since then it has not stopped growing and offering hundreds of features to its users highlighting above all the possibility of publishing on all types of devices, from console to PC / MAC / Linux or Web.
Although it started with three programming languages available to develop, recently they are focusing on C # as the main language, having abandoned the support for Javascript. One of the advantages it has over its competitors is a huge online store where you can buy ready-made components that will help you save hundreds of hours of programming and thousands of headaches.
In the Game Developers Conference (GDC) of 2019 they have presented a final demo, showing once again that they are much more than a simple game engine for arcades 2D indies.
Game Maker
Game Maker
With Game Maker we find a game engine in which we do not need to know how to program to make our first steps in the world of development, because thanks to a powerful WYSIWYG editor we can create all kinds of scripts by dragging and dropping elements on the screen. Another difference with their older brothers is that Game Maker is designed to create 2D games, offering only some basic functions for 3D. Even being a more limited engine than Unity or Unreal Engine, we have seen how highly talented teams have created authentic works of art such as Nuclear Throne, Downwell, Undertale or Hotline Miami.
Cry Engine
CryEngine
When Crysis came on the market in 2007, Crytek left even the most skeptical ice creams with the graffiti we saw on our screens. We were not used to that level of detail in a game, although we were not used to the requirements that he asked us to move it to the maximum.
All that graphic spectacle was moved by what at that time was the most powerful graphic engine in the market, although over time it was losing that advantage with its rivals and little by little Epic with Unreal was gaining an advantage by leaps and bounds, leaving CryEngine almost relegated to I forget among the developers, because practically no game is currently developed with it, only Crytek uses it for its developments. Regretting it a lot, if you want to invest time in making games we think it's better to forget about it and devote yourself to other tools ...
SDL 2
SDL 2
So far we have talked about game engines with environments where we can develop, but with SDL we go to the development of old-style games: using C ++ and libraries that offer us access to all the necessary hardware (controls, keyboard, mouse, sound) and of course the graphic. We will have to think about the entire architecture of the game before launching to program, but we learn a lot more.