Custom game engines
and why they (don’t) suck 

Whether you are doing game development yourself, or if you’re working on other (non-game) projects, you’re likely to run into those dreaded situations where you need to make a decision, and it’s hard to tell which one is the correct one, and which one will end up costing you a lot of headaches down the line.

Eric Lavesson, senior software architect at Edument and the lead developer of Decemberborn Interactive reflects on the choices of writing a custom game engine in C++. Why is writing your engine probably a bad idea, and why, in that case, would he probably do it all over again? Almost a year after it’s initial release, the game Cathedral has been announced for the Nintendo Switch. 

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This webinar will cover the broad strokes of the game engine’s architecture; what goes into creating a game engine? How do you port it to different hardware? How do you make sure it can be ported when you don’t even know which hardware you’re going to target? Why would you write a game engine in times where mature products such as Unity and Unreal engine already exist?

 

This webinar is for the most part a retrospective on game engine architecture; we’ll cover principles of software design and architecture that could be applied in any software project, using a game engine as an example.