I'm not nearly as far into the research as I would like to be at this late stage, but I'm doing the best I can. It is likely that I will be doing some work in college... at least, that is the hope. If there is somethign else going on during the class, then I may be sliiiightly scraped for time.
But I thought a good place for me to start working was the Unity Engine, it being something that we didn't discuss in class. And on reflection, this is proving to be a fortunate choice, for reading up on what the engine is capable of has given me features to look out for in the rest of my research.
I shall try not to regurgitate information found on either their website or their Wikipedia page, but in essence... the engine seems to be focused on accessibility and workflow. Without having used their engine directly I cannot possibly say for certain whether this is indeed the case, but based on their word... Unity is capable of publishing content onto multiple gaming platforms... for example, publishing on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 without having to work on seperate versions. Being a player of games upon PC, I have witnessed first hand some rather shoddy ports of console games, normally as a result of developers outsourcing to external companies... I imagine that at present, creating the same game for different platforms can be time consuming and a drain on resources and time for game developers. To be able to do this without using too much manpower or exporting it to another company... well, that would certainly save time and money for a team.
Another aspect of the engine seems to revolve around an in-application store where assets can be purchased... and although I question why a development team would want to use something premade... I can appreciate the usefulness this could bring to speeding up the production cycle, like say... if I were making a game and I had a lot of content to create, then being able to purchase some elements to enable more time to work on other elements would be a considerable boost.
I also read about the engine being able to accept edited image files without having to reimport the file intothe engine everytime. That gave me a teeny tiny flashback to Thursday when I saw the on the fly lighting and particle systems in the UE4 engine. That might not be the greatest comparison, given that particles would rather trump imagery/textures, but in both cases, these are all about shaving time off work schedules, and that can soon add up.
And I think I'm going to stop there for now. It is a start.
(Edit: This link )
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