Choosing the Infrastructure for Entertainment and Serious Computer Games - a Whiteroom Benchmark for Game Engine Selection

The technology base, i.e. the infrastructure, for modern computer games is usually provided by a game engine. At the start of the game development process, developers usually face the choice of either developing their own proprietary game engine or to license an existing engine to build on. The question of what constitutes a game engine, however, is rather ill defined. This paper aims to address these problems by presenting a method for simplifying the process of evaluating engines for their suitability for game development projects, comparing a number of game engines and using our findings as a basis for a definition of the term ´game engine´.