Our previous experience of game engines had been that of pain and strife. The kind of pain that leaves you helpless wondering what went wrong. Taking three days to integrate an asset into the game by running a bunch of command-line tools, getting errors during the compile which made absolutely no sense, and then running through oodles of code without a single word of documentation to fix it. If this sounds mysteriously familiar to you then you've probably worked on Valve's Source Engine before!

With that experience in mind, we warily downloaded the Gamebryo engine for evaluation and got a pleasant surprise!!! Integrated tools to compile assets automatically into the game engines from popular 3D authoring tools, tools like scene designers and world-builder that let an artist build up levels without touching the code ... that's when we quickly realized what Gamebryo was - it was a game engine written with strong software engineering principles. That attracted us immediately.

A quick study of the classes revealed that Gamebryo is truly multi-genre. None of the classes were specifically designed for any particular genre making the engine extremely flexible to use.

The middleware integrations offered by Gamebryo is phenomenal with many components like Audio Kinetix coming integrated out of the box. The middleware that caught our attention though were Morpheme and Lightsprint.

Morpheme is a very powerful animation management tool, allowing game developers to seamlessly blend animations and control the character effectively. Morpheme is soon to be integrated with Euphoria, an even more powerful tool that can automatically calculate human body dynamics.

Lightsprint is another very powerful middleware for games that allows game developers to add global illumination, real-time radiosity and color bleeding to scenes. This was something unheard of, even a couple of years back. Real cutting-edge technology.

But, it doesn't stop there, Gamebryo also gives you a unified layer on which you can build games for the Xbox, PS3 and the Wii. Gamebryo is one of the few engines that supports the Wii natively. This means that most of the development work can be common across platforms, leaving only the artwork, esp. the shaders for customization to various platforms. This resylts in very quick development cycles.

One of the best features about Gamebryo also is the rapid-protoyping feature which lets you switch assets when the game is running. Nifty eh?

The support from the folks at Gamebryo was simply splendid with constant follow-ups on our progress and a lot of interest, general help and advice on the engine. All in all, we'd highly recommend this engine to anybody who wants to get into serious game development. If you want proof, check out Fallout 3 by Bethesda games. You'll be pretty convinced about the engine!