Building a Game Engine: A Tale of Modern Model-Driven Engineering

Game engines enable developers to reuse assets from previously developed games, thus easing the software-engineering challenges around the video-game development experience and making the implementation of games less expensive, less technologically brittle, and more efficient. However, the construction of game engines is challenging in itself, it involves the specification of well defined architectures and typical game play behaviors, flexible enough to enable game designers to implement their vision, while, at the same time, simplifying the implementation through asset and code reuse. In this paper we present a set of lessons learned through the design and construction PhyDSL-2, a game engine for 2D physics-based games. Our experience involves the active use of modern model-driven engineering technologies, to overcome the complexity of the engine design and to systematize its maintenance and evolution.