Build Your Own Game Engine

Scott Gordon
Dept. of Computer Science, Sacramento State University

Stevenson Hall 1300
11:00 AM - 11:50 AM

Video games today are built using engines such as Unity, Unreal, Lumberyard, CryEngine, and dozens of others.  The engine handles the basic tasks common to all games: 3D real-time rendering, object and scene-graph management, lighting, cameras, animation, etc.  Perhaps you've used an engine to make your own game, but have you ever thought of building your own engine?  It's a fun and challenging project that appeals to aspiring hard-core coders.  Dr. Scott Gordon is a professor at Sacramento State University, where students in his Game Architecture course build video games atop his own game engine "TAGE".  But a few of his most ambitious students opt instead to first build their own engine from scratch.  In this talk, Dr. Gordon describes how game engines are organized, and how to build your own.