Rolling your game engine vs using an existing engine.
1 May 2007This post will further discuss the RPG that I am going to develop. In the last post I covered the choice of top down vs 1st person. In this post I will discuss some aspects of the game engine.
When starting out on this one will I have to make a choice from the beginning that will affect almost every aspect of the game. This decision is, should I roll my own game engine from scratch (based on existing rendering engines) or, use an existing engine or sdk?
The obvious benefit of rolling your own engine is control of how every aspect is implemented. Of course the corresponding downside of this is the time and difficulty involved in doing so.
Conversely, the downside of using an existing engine is that you have little to no control of the implementation. The benefits are that you will have an existing base or platform and tools to get quickly up to speed.
Since I am the only person working on this project currently, I think the choice to cede control of the internal implementation details to an existing engine is the best. Also, many of the existing game engine SDKs have available source code; this in my opinion mitigates some of the concerns about losing control of you game’s base.
on May 6th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
[…] with last post about the importance of a game design document (GDD) I was delving into some of the choices about game engines. In short I’ve decided to use and existing game […]