A game engine is usually made up of a rendering engine, used to generate an image based on a model, a physics engine to make the game have physics such as gravity/acceleration or collision detection.
There is usually also sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence, networking, streaming, memory management, threading, localisation support and a scene graph.
In 2D game engines, there may not be certain things missing from the above, like networking, streaming, memory management and more. Those particular things aren't as necessary as 2D games are seen as more simple.
Game engines are the core object in making a game because as the name suggests, they are engines that make the game work.
There are many different game engines. The first game engine was created in the 1980s, notably, 1987's Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit. In the 1990s the engines were finally named engines and were specifically made by third-parties to work with many different games based on the same engine. id software's Doom and Quake, for example, were made using the same game engine.
Different game engines have certain features.
The CryEngine by Crytek has many features. Notable features include particles, motion blur & shadows, high quality 3d water, natural lighting & dynamic soft shadows and a facial animation editor.
The MascotCapsule Eruption engine was used for the game Resident Evil 4 and its features include motion blending, shadow projection and avatar enhancements.
The Unity game engine has drag and drop functions which help the user to put what they need where they need, faster than they could before. Unity's other features include integrated development environment with hierarchical, visual editing, detailed property inspectors and live game preview and the games created on Unity can be played on most platforms.
The game engine Grit was made especially for open world games such as Grand Theft Auto. Optimisations include a 24-hour cycle for day and night, easily implementable planes & cars and a general purpose 3d physics engine.
The Torque game engine, made for the game Tribes 2, had a few unique features at its release, these being support of rendering 3D models in the DTS and the DIF file formats. These were not suitable for animation so were used for buildings and landscapes. They had bounding boxes which perfectly matched the visible geometry.
The Torque 2d engine is similar but made for 2d game creating. It is one of the more powerful 2d engines, with particle effects, tile manipulation and behaviour assignment. It is also a widely-used engine.
With these features, comparisons can be made. Comparing two, in this case Unity and UDK.
In terms of usability, Unity has drag and drop features, allowing for quick and easy scripting. This would be better for people who aren't as good with scripting. Unity also has extremely high potential in cross-platforming. It can be used on almost every platform including iOS, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PCs, Wii, and more. Unity is also good for smaller teams with a smaller budget as there is a free version available and UDK would cost money even as an entry fee.
UDK, or the Unreal Engine 3 (its current revision), is optimised to be easy for beginners to pick up and learn quickly so that they can work quicker as they improve. This can help beginners as it can be intimidating opening a game engine that has so many features. UDK has a wide range of platforms that games made can be imported to, including PCs and iOS. While this is not as wide as in Unity, this still covers the most popular options. UDK would be better for a large, big-budget team as Unreal takes 20% of the profits and for a small group, this could break the company as it could be too much to take from them.
As an example of side scrollers, which was what I was going to make, I looked at an old classic featuring Nintendo's Mario.
Many believe Mario's first appearance was in Mario Bros. from 1983, but it was in fact the game Donkey Kong from 1981, created for games arcades and only being available at such. It was made by Nintendo who, back then, were not well very known in the gaming industry. As they seemed to be among few creating games at this early era of gaming, they made the most of the fact that it was a new thing and they strived to be the best at it. And nobody can really argue with that.
As I had no arcade cabinet, I had to find the game online on a website. I played it on a site called classicgamesarcade.com. As expected due to its time of creation, the game was very simple, but by no means easy. This is quite an important aspect, actually: The idea that a game can be simple but still a challenge. Sometimes, there is no need to be mindbogglingly complex to a point where it's hard because you just do not know what's going on, but hard because of required skill, timing, etc.
Looking at the aesthetics, the hardware limitations were a huge part of just what could go into the game. I believe that with limitations comes more creativity in a way, as if given no limits, a game can just have anything and everything thrown in 'because it can be' - a very bad idea. However, with such limitations as the early arcade cabinets, there isn't even space for creativity, so they had to make the background very basic (just a black screen with some red lines to be the platforms, actually), but I believe the sprites, particularly of Donkey Kong, are quite nice looking despite the limitations.
The style of this game seems to be quite cartoony, which is what I'd like mine to be. I don't know if this is cartoon-like on purpose, or if that's because of the limitations of that time. It's possible that both are true - perhaps the creators, Nintendo, knew of their restrictions and aimed to create a game whose style takes full advantage of this. For a game made in 1981, it does seem to have a nice, animated cartoon sort of style which makes it seem more of a family game, which is what it was released as.
Overall, I didn't play this game for too long as to me, it's a little bit boring. I can see how it was good at its time, but as games have evolved SO MUCH since then it's all a little underwhelming in this day and age. The mechanics are there, however, and the control scheme is tight enough that if you mess up, it's only your fault and not because of slow button reactions or things like this, which may have been a problem back then.
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