Chapter 8. Mobile Game Engines

A game engine is a software used to develop and run games. It is based on a collection of tools to create or import all assets and elements of a videogame, and pull them together to make them work as a whole. Rendering, materials and lighting, physics, particle effects, collision detection and management, AI and gameplay scripting, GUI design and game controls: a good game engine either allows to directly create such game elements and functions, or offers the possibility to import elements and assets from other software. For example, 3D models are usually created with third-party programs such as 3D Studio Max or Maya, and are then imported with a specific file format (such as *.fbx files) in the game engine

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• What a game engine is
• What engines can do
• The main characteristics of the most popular game engines
• The first part of the tutorial to create a game with Unity 3D

For quite a long time, game companies...