By Anthony Maywright Research Paper Block 2 Game Design 09/17/13

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When you are developing a game, certainly the time will come when you have to start adding content to it. This might be an easy task at first: just set up some arrays and objects inside your code. But as your development progresses, I can almost guarantee you your content code will start to look messy. Writing tools to aid you on your game development process is a more complicated but more rewarding approach. You could write a tool that would translate all that content code visually into the level itself for you, and as you change it, the tool would change the content code. You could also write tools to help create more content for your game, help you debug your game and even help deployment to multiple platforms as well. Or you could go one level higher and release the tool to your players and let them create content for your game too! Webster's Dictionary defines a 'game engine' as 'the word you've entered isn't in the dictionary,' but if it were to define it, it would probably explain that a game engine is used as the overall architecture to develop and run a game – it gives developers tools to create the disparate elements of a videogame and then pull them together to create a functioning whole. From the renderer to the physics system, sound architecture, scripting, AI and networking, game engines either natively power every aspect of a game, or they allow other specialized middleware to slot into the game's framework. In any case, game engines are the workhorses of modern videogame development. As you'd expect, there are plenty of engines out there, from very well-known names like Quake and Unreal, which developers and publishers can license at considerable expense, through to in-house proprietary engines created by studios specifically for their own titles. Rage for example. RAGE's strengths are many. Its ability to handle large streaming worlds, complex A.I. arrangements, weather effects, fast network code and a multitude of gameplay styles will be obvious to anyone who has played GTA IV. It's also incredibly welcoming of partner middleware. Euphoria from NaturalMotion, a dynamic animation engine, bonded with RAGE like they'd been split at birth (a feat LucasArts were unable to achieve with Star Wars: The Force Unleashed), as did the Bullet physics engine from Erwin Coumans. And it is still so young: accurate physics, ecosystem A.I. and improved draw distance are just some of the improvements we'll see in RAGE over the coming months. As Seen In: Gears of War, Mass Effect, BioShock, Unreal Tournament, Deus Ex, GRAW, Red Steel, Borderlands, Brothers in Arms, Homefront, Mirror's Edge, Singularity, Rainbow Six: Vegas and a gazillion more How many times have you seen the words "heavily-modified Unreal Engine" somewhere in a game preview or a press release? Since its first incarnation in 1998, Epic Games' Unreal Engine (now in its third generation) has evolved to become the multi-format engine of choice for many of the major and minor publishing houses. It turns up in the strangest of places (Surf's Up) and even in games from developers with their own impressive tech (BioWare, EA, Ubisoft). As Seen in: Call of Duty 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Call of Duty: World at War, Quantum of Solace, Modern Warfare 2
That would be IW as in Infinity Ward, the legendary developer behind arguably the biggest franchise of this generation, Call of Duty. Although the original game in the series ran off the id Tech 3 engine, for the highly regarded Call of Duty 2 the developer built its own in-house middleware which, until recently, had no official name. When questioned at E3 this year, however, we were told by an Infinity Ward rep that the upcoming Modern Warfare 2 would be running on the IW 4.0 engine, a generation beyond what we saw in the